artwork images by Hayla Hay, portrait by Jeff Cancelosi
Blooms
January 2024
The environments of our bodies, like that of the earth, are impacted quite easily by seemingly small actions.
With growth and change, often comes pain. The friction of change can be great, as can be seen in the moving tectonic plates of the earth, wildfires wiping entire ecosystems, waste polluting streams and removing resources from those who had depended on them. The impacts of these blights is great and terrible, and yet they contain strange and beautiful visual moments.
The human body reflects harshnesses as well in strange, horrible, and beautiful ways. Blooms is a reflection of this painful growth and ultimate survival, of plants obliterated into paper and formed onto steel, rusting away at its strength with only the water that formed the paper. On its surface is blooms of plant-based dyes. These blooms mimic the color and form of a painful rash called erythema multiformae, an unlikely but unfortunate immune response to exposure to a common virus, or an allergic reaction to a medicine intended to help.
This artwork was part of the show Third Spaces of the Anthropocene: Art in-between the Human and Natural Worlds, curated by Jetshri Bhadviya at the Detroit Artists Market.
