Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
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I am excited by an artistic theme I have been pursuing these past months. I have named the series ‘Flora-Persona.’
Using only natural materials, including plants, trees and associated leaves and seeds, and avoiding the use of any manmade materials during the creative process (such as paints, adhesives, and dyes), I purposefully manipulate plants and other flora in a zoomorphic or anthropomorphic manner.
Relying solely on Nature’s bounty is an artistic departure for me in some ways, yet a continuum of my focus on addressing the rising environmental damage, including climate-related disruptions, which our industrialized world has wrought.
Inspired by my research in support of my painting entitled ‘Wood-Wide Web’ (which I previously presented on ClimateCultures in my post with Eva Strautmann), I became acutely aware of the ability of various tree and plant species, along with fungi, to communicate and share resources with one another in a symbiotic manner.
‘Wood-Wide Web’ portrays a forest, field, or meadow not merely as a collection of competing individuals in a shared location, but rather as an interconnected community where resource sharing and communication play a significant role in the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Mitakuye Oyasin: we are all related
My research led me to read about the Mother Tree Project. This large-scale, decade-long research effort led by Dr. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, revealed that neighboring trees and plants are in communication with one another via an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in our brains.
I was astonished to learn that in one study, Simard documented that a Douglas fir tree that was injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a Ponderosa pine tree growing nearby. The pine tree then produced enzymes to protect itself against the nearby insect invasion.
To me, a form of collective consciousness was in play within the web of life, across at least two Kingdoms. In biological taxonomy, life forms are organized into hierarchical groups: Kingdoms are at the top, with phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species being progressively lower tiers. Fungi are in a separate Kingdom from trees and plants, yet they support one another in a mutually beneficial way.
Not so with respect to humanity, the alpha species in the Kingdom of Animalia. I began to see more clearly that we don’t support the interconnected web of life, and in fact we continue to disrupt the very symbiotic fabric that the wood-wide web illustrates.
During my daily walk in the woods behind my home, I began to consider more thoughtfully how alienated we all are from the natural world, and I began to ponder how a conscious wood-wide web of interconnected life that surrounds me might view humankind. Yes, not a comforting thought.
The artistic concept of ‘Flora Persona’ formed slowly. My evolving viewpoint was also informed by a Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“We are all related”). The phrase expresses the idea that every living entity shares the same divine origin and life force, and that humanity is part of a complex reciprocal web of existence, rather than separate from, or superior to, nature.
My artistic interest was thus stimulated by both non-Western and ancient beliefs concerning the shared web of life and by my newfound understanding that plants and trees have some form of elementary consciousness, as demonstrated by their ability to communicate across species, genus, families, and all the way up the hierarchical groups, to include across the two noted Kingdoms.
Reaching back to our roots in art
Both climate and human culture, including artistic expression, have intersected in many ways throughout our species’ course of time. In this evolving series, I delve deeply into our ancient past for artistic inspiration. I suggest that we have been creating art across the various climate epochs we have inhabited, since times immemorial. I believe that both the flora and fauna available in long-ago times provided source materials used to create art, back into earlier hominin eras.
It is reasonable to assume that humans have been making art from biodegradable materials, including masks, figurines, and sculptures, for more than one hundred thousand years.
Masks and sculptures have been my primary focus to date. My artistic goal is to present man-manipulated natural elements in a manner that harkens back to our early ancestors.
With respect to cave paintings, the earliest known artistic expressions for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consisting of non-figurative symbolic markings, are more than 70,000 years old. They are still in existence today, due to their isolation and protection from the weathering elements. Other art, made from natural materials and not contained within caves, clearly has not been preserved.
One of my flora-persona series interests is using burdock (Arctium lappa) seed heads to create extinct local animals that were plentiful in my region of Maryland, USA during the Woodland and Archaic Periods — such as the wooly mammoth and the cave bear. It is my contention that such natural materials were used to create art by these ancient native ancestors, and indeed perhaps as far back as our early hominin ancestors.
Burdock plant and collected seed heads, as well as a few examples of my ‘Burr Art ‘, are presented below:
Plant masks: viewing how our relatives might see us
With respect to making human-like faces from plant leaves, I was inspired to begin this Flora-Persona series when pondering the wood-wide web and, particularly, the nascent consciousness documented via chemical communication networks formed between fungi, plants, and trees.
These leaf masks are not necessarily made to be worn. Rather, they are meant to present these wonders of nature as a member of our distant family, aligned with the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”: we are all related.
I continue to experiment with different plants, seeds, leaves, and tree bark, all picked up along my daily walks in my neighboring Black Hill Park. I find myself drawn to creating leaf masks that present the viewer with an unsettled view of how we humans might be viewed by our distant plant relatives, such as displaying sorrow, shock, disappointment, and anger. These sentiments seem very proper to me, considering the continuing harm we cause to the interconnected web of life.
Below are three photos. The first shows how I applied juice to several of my leaf masks, a natural dye from ripe purple pokeweed berries that I had gathered.
The next is a photo of one of my framed leaf masks:
The final photos show a large 36” x 36” canvas I painted and then displayed, with four of my leaf masks within its four quadrants, followed by close-ups of the masks.
Find more
From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Michael — “I used Gemini AI as a background search tool — looking for other examples of both my ‘burr art’ and ‘leaf art.’ Frankly, not much out there — at least from my initial research.”
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Michael adds: “A young friend from Scotland, after looking at my burr art, brought to my attention the annual ancient event called the ‘Burryman,’ which happened to occur mid-August. The Burryman is a centuries-old Scottish folk tradition where a local man is covered head-to-toe in thousands of sticky burdock burrs and paraded through the area.” Find more at Wikipedia.
You can see Michael’s work with fellow ClimateCultures member, artist Eva Strautmann, in their post The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration, which features both artists’ paintings on the topic.
This piece for the Ecological Disciple by Lenore Three Stars, The Way Forward: Mitakuye Oyasi — A Worldview (11/6/26) explores the value of an approach to our shared world that starts from the position that “We are all related” (Mitakuye Oyasi can also mean “All my relations.”)
More on the Mother Tree Project, founded by Dr. Suzanne Simard, can be found at The Mother Tree Project & Program, a research and outreach initiative housed in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just collections of individual trees.
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