Visual artist & storyteller
Shelby Reed (b. 2000) is an artist working in ceramic & mixed media sculpture. Her work explores themes of femininity, queerness, & the body through fantasy, narrative, and worldbuilding.
Born and raised in Bucks County Pennsylvania she received a BFA in ceramics from The Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University & is currently an MFA candidate in Ceramics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Shelby’s work has been included in several juried group exhibitions such as the 2024 NCECA Juried Student Exhibition at the Visual Art Center of Richmond, Pink Silo at Wavelength Space in Chattanooga TN, & Gilded Shadows at Park Towne Place Galleries in Philadelphia PA. Her second solo exhibition, Similar Paths, took place at Gallery 1010 in Knoxville, TN in 2025. She has attended residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, the Hambidge Center, & will be traveling to Vermont Studio Center this summer.
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Statement
I create ceramic, fiber, and mixed media sculptures that serve as set pieces, bringing my fantastical short stories to life. My work explores how fantasy can be used as a tool to communicate through visual storytelling. My creative writing practice works alongside my object making with florals, always taking center stage.
The pieces investigate the floral and harvester characters. These characters are central to the story, worldbuilding, and narrative of my work. The work comes together to deeply investigate the themes and repetitive cycles of extraction, power, agency, birth, growth, death, and decay present in the work.
Sculpted objects illustrate the narrative, point to specific events in the story, showcase the characters, and their complex relationship. Floral characters act as a stand in for the body. These characters are feminine, sexual, and wild until they are tamed and controlled. The harvester character is an allegory for control and order, performing acts of extraction, power, and desire. The narrative and characters of the work connect to larger themes of femininity, queerness, and the body.
The floral forms are presented out of their original context, displaced from their natural habitat, and presented as specimens. Floral forms wrap around themselves with petal-like forms, cradling and protecting their fleshy core - the seed pod-like forms growing guard petals to enclose their delicate contents.
Floral specimens are displayed in vitrines and reliquaries, their bodies presented as whole and complete: a body, a stem, and roots. The specimens in the vitrines illustrate stages of decay. Other pieces display floral characters that have been segmented, dissected, and presented in altars. These floral bodies are picked and sliced into parts.
Fantasy writing and worldbuilding is often deeply connected to ideas of human nature, faith, religion, ritual, and worship. Fantasy can act as escapism as well as a way to explore and critique human nature. This is why my work originates from fantasy.
While my work is not directly about current religions in our society, I borrow existing ideas and visual references in the creation of my own work. The pieces and gallery layout will reference renaissance altar pieces and triptychs, seen in gothic architecture and cathedrals. Building my own visual and written language in conversation with art historical works and other artists exploring fantasy.
The harvester is obsessed with the florals attempting to preserve its life and beauty forever, but this is a fleeting attempt - they always end up dried, guard petals unable to protect the delicate core, fallen into the ground like the last that came before it. But the harvester continues trying -new harvesting tools, new preservation methods, but it’s never enough. The florals are only able to flourish in their natural environment untouched by the harvester. The harvester turns to faith, creating altars to the florals in an attempt to allow the preservation to finally succeed - alters to these floral forms, symmetric, beautiful yet horrifying, obsessive in creation towards an unachievable end.
The harvester cannot help themselves, spending hours in the dirt observing. Obsessed with the floral characters, desperately yearning to be like them. Watching the petals fall from the floral body trapped in the glass vitrine, imagining themselves meeting the same fate. Body on the ground, skin dry and bleached from the sun.