Becoming a Plant: Resurrection Project / Kathy High

18 September – 06 December 2015

After purchasing a plot at a green burial site, Kathy High has designed a garden that was planted above her body. Her body became these plants’ bodies and became a plant.

The plants were chosen based on their common names – and the poetry (or irony) of those names. These plants made up her ‘headstone’ and grave marker – a plant poem representing different aspects of her life – from the coy to the innocent, the intuitive to the jaded. She continued to include other indigenous plants to flesh out other aspects of her personality, researching the plants’ various properties.

High experimented with plantings to test this garden, which is what we see in her photographs. To promote growth and honor the dead with burial, she placed animal carcasses that her cats have hunted under the flora. This is death, and decomposition at work: organisms devouring each other in a constant process of symbiosis – things eating things, exchanging, becoming.

This was a process of naturally buried human bodies becoming a plant – with no regrets.

Exhibited as part of the group show Seeing The Forest Through The Trees at AND Festival 2015.