Holothuroidea Sculpture

This piece, created after a wiccan ritual, explores the concepts of nature worship and the notion of asking permission from the plants before collecting live samples. As part of my general aesthetic, I began exploring the idea of botanical sentience after a project exploring a Buddhist meditation technique in which the practitioner meditates at the base of a tree as a replication of the moment Buddha attained enlightenment. Because of this moment, Buddhists view trees as sacred and in need of protection. This reverence led me to explore other spiritual traditions involving nature. Of course, nature worship is as old as humanity itself, but I find the wiccan tradition interesting because the practice is a development. The tenets of the spiritual practice attribute energy and sentience to all things. A practitioner respects all and before harvesting, from a tree for example, a ceremony of respect and permission is performed. I performed this ritual on a spruce tree, a patch of lichen moss, a magnolia tree and had the strongest experience with a maple tree in my own backyard. The sensation I felt while meditating with the maple tree was akin to that of deep meditation and raised theta waves. The final piece combines my collected samples into an insect like creature, an embodiment of the energy imbued in the process.