Scholar｜Shelby Reed: Bodies in Bloom

Inside glass containers and silk-lined altars, Shelby Reed’s ceramic figures resemble flowers that have taken on the memory of a body. In her series Holding Eternally…, petals, glass, and hand-dyed wool seem to breathe within their transparent chambers. The works feel both intimate and analytical, as if she were studying her own reflection through material. Clay, glass, and resin share a single pulse.

Shelby Reed, Holding Eternally…, 2025, ceramic, glass, hand-dyed wool, silk, wood, resin, flocking, foam, metal, acrylic paint; Holding Close… (detail), 2025, hand-dyed wool, ceramic, glass, resin. Courtesy of the artist.

This year, Reed was named the 2025 Liu Shiming Scholar at the University of Tennessee School of Art, joining the Foundation’s growing network of artists who explore material and human connection through sculpture.

Our conversation began on a quiet afternoon at a small café near the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Reed had just come from the studio, her hands faintly dusted with clay. She spoke carefully, pausing often, thinking about how to describe a process that is more cyclical than linear. Ceramics, she explained, has always been her first language. As a child, she took classes at a community art center inside a state park, a place where students collected stones and leaves before shaping clay. That early rhythm—touch, gather, form—still structures her work. 

Reed described herself as the only artist in her family, someone who learned by moving forward without a map. Her practice grows from that sense of self-direction. During our conversation she spoke about two recurring characters in her work: the floral body and the harvester. The first embodies desire and transformation. The second is a quiet force that hovers between maker and subject, a presence that questions who has power to create or to collect. Reed’s reading of science fiction—stories like Dune and Annihilation—informs this pairing. She builds worlds from fragments of biology and myth, allowing the viewer to sense both nurture and control at once.

Her installations extend beyond sculpture into space. She arranges ceramic blooms under glass vitrines, alongside mirrors and painted altars. Each setting borrows from art history and display culture: Renaissance still lifes, church reliquaries, and museum specimen cases. She said she enjoys watching viewers hesitate in front of a vitrine, uncertain whether the object inside is sacred, toxic, or preserved. The glass, she added, acts as a lens between beauty and danger. Recently, her attention has turned toward the human form itself. She has been attending figure-drawing sessions, translating sketches into hybrid forms that merge petal and limb. “I want to see what happens,” she said, “when the flower becomes more body than plant.”

Shelby Reed. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In the coming year, Reed will complete her thesis at the University of Tennessee and present a new body of sculptural work. She hopes to teach in the future, perhaps returning to a community arts center like the one where she began. Her practice keeps returning to that idea of continuity—the act of shaping, holding, and learning through touch.

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Interviewed by: Chirui Cheng

Written by: Chirui Cheng