Garden Of Shapeshifters
Erin Gallagher
Goldsmiths University of London
The shapeshifter is a figure of survival, transformation, and possibility. In Garden of Shapeshifters, bodies and plants merge, undergoing continual reconfiguration until the boundaries between flesh and landscape begin to dissolve. Plants entangle and grow from the body, transforming it into living terrain. The plants within these works are ruderal species—plants that thrive on disturbed ground, emerging after fires, along railway embankments and through fissures in concrete. As living archives, they bear witness to disturbance while adapting to its conditions. Shapeshifting becomes a way of imagining survival beyond restoration: not a return to what existed before, but the possibility of becoming otherwise.