BioIndicators

Melanie Barnett
Mar 23
2 min read

When I was a child every spring the frogs would wake with the thaw of the algae-rich dugouts. I would scale the rotting, lichen-cloaked wooden fence that divided the farmyard from the overgrown, grassy, and ignored pasture. A graveyard of rusted-out cars and tractors lined the perimeter: forgotten relics of a 1970s farming practice kept on hand “just in case”.

The brown grass and last year’s bulrushes would tower above my head. With the canopy of scattered aspen cloaking me from the sun I would make my way to an old log that sat at the edge of the dugout. There I would sit, listening to the frogs.

When I was fifteen years old I stood at the end of the driveway waiting for the school bus to make its way down the gravel road. It was that year that I realized there were no frogs: their songs went silent, and that silence persisted for years.

BioIndicator 7. 2026. Ceramic ^10 oxidation, 8 x 6.5 x 2

Years later I learned that the most likely reason for the frogs’ disappearance was an outbreak of armyworms – the larval form of a moth that feasts on canola and deciduous trees. The worms themselves didn’t affect the frogs’ populations, but the pesticides sprayed on the shelterbelts surrounding the farmyards and dugouts did. Frogs have notoriously thin skin: they absorb these chemicals and gradually they build up. Eventually the frogs die.

BioIndicator 6. 2026. Ceramic ^10 oxidation, 5 x 7.5 x 1.75"

If you were to think of the pasture at my family farm as an ecosystem then you could come to the conclusion that the frogs were an indicator species: a species that tells you something about the wellbeing of an ecosystem. Bioindicators in ecology are any species, biological process, or community of organisms that scientists are able to track to gauge the health of the environment.

BioIndicator 2 (detail). Ceramic ^10 oxidation. 11 x 6 x 1.5"

In this body of work I have taken inspiration from the run-down cars that sit next to the ponds where the frogs live(d). The ceramic sculptures in this series echo automotive dashboards, farm equipment, radios, and welders to create speculative machinery with vague purposes. Instead of dials and gauges that would reveal information about the machine’s purpose, I have placed living organisms: wildflowers, frogs, lichen, and algae, that connect to the machines.

The BioIndicators’ purposes are left largely to interpretation, but one thing is clear: the human-made machines and the plants and animals in the little windows have some influence on one another. They are a speculative element of a possible future.