To think like a ‘plant’ as a painter is to observe how plants intermingle with their environment as substances that coincide and ‘melt’ with the world. These recent works are made in an attempt to untangle Michelle Reid's relationship with materiality and painting, by using gardening as a metaphor. To paint like a ‘gardener’ cultivates compositional questions entwining aesthetic critique; material relationships; spaces of mixture; and nature under pressure as a resource.

Throughout painting the works turn and move between the wall and floor. Paintings begin during gesso preparation when colour tints whites, followed by thin glazes of oil paint. Layering, drawing, staining, printing, and blurring impress traces in paint. Michelle Reid thinks of paintings as permeable containers melting together, like seedlings within their environment, by using images or materials as spaces of atmospheric mixtures.