In Anne Richter’s The Sleep of Plants, a young woman plants herself in a huge stoneware pot and patiently waits to grow roots regardless of her mother's disappointment and fiancee's disbelief. Eventually she transitions into a blossoming tree. This feminist take on Daphne’s fate focuses on the act of re-wildening and understanding that, indeed, we are nature, rather than on a swift escape from so-called human reality.

Inspired by the story and her ancestral knowledges linked with forests, Emilia Martin built three large organically-shaped pots along with several vessels and tree-like structures, which she then dressed with hands and braids that might just as well be mushrooms and snakes. Laced with a hint of Genesis and childhood memories of poisonous serpents, the work reflects on transformations, ambiguity and the false dichotomy between human and nature. Following Lynn Margulis’s philosophy of Gaia, everything in Martin’s work is interconnected and resists simple definitions: human hands turn into flowering bodies, aortas become tree trunks, pots become soil.

And at the same time, Martin touches deeper layers of the imagination and subconsciousness, where the mind goes quiet and the hands simply shape the clay (or perhaps, clay shapes the hands?).

written by Nanne op't Ende