About The Artist

• Artists Statement:

My work explores textual and visual language and autobiography. It attempts to escape the confines of traditional linear narratives by using more chaotic and cyclical patterns to describe experience in a more realistic way.

In this project I have subverted the Victorian idea of flower arranging as a ‘safe’ occupation to tame (women’s) idle hands and minds’, by creating bouquets of flowers which are not just pretty and perfect but which reveal something uncontrollable.  Among other things I wanted to make visible the physical, sexual and emotional impact of the menstrual cycle.

Through making this work I have created an alternative language to express myself. I have literally ‘said it with flowers’. Taking the bouquet of flowers (a formal arrangement bringing order to the wildness and sexuality of flowers) as symbolic of the effect of linear narrative structures on the psyche, I have created bouquets which reveal a complex and chaotic nature.

I began the project with extracts edited from a diary I had written over a 28 day period. Although my diary is personal, it is not an honest document revealing an essential true self. In fact I used to lie to my diary all the time, censoring my inner thoughts. The extracts show a person constantly shifting and changing, making decisions and unmaking them, being inconstant, flighty and at times serious. The fact that there are 28 reflects the menstrual cycle and the moon – the life and death of an egg, sexuality and fertilization – once you get to bouquet 28 you start again at the beginning.

I then chose the flowers, which would make up the bouquets based on their symbolic meanings. I wanted the meanings to sometimes reinforce the diary extracts and sometimes contradict them. Victorian floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express unspoken feelings. My choices of flower should do the same – expressing feelings and character traits not always visible in the diary texts.

Through the ‘arrangement’ of each bouquet I wanted to add another subtext – sometimes contradicting and sometimes illustrating the diary texts. The bouquets look deliberately sexual, harsh, silly, sickly and weird as well as beautiful.

The work speaks against over civilisation, excessive nurture, Christianity and separation from nature. It rejects perfection and a higher order.

In the 19th century artistic creativity was seen as fundamentally male, with the artist being the sole origin and meaning of his work.  Women weren’t allowed to create their own images of femaleness and had to conform to patriarchal standards imposed on them.  The image of ‘woman’ was either the witch/monster or the eternal feminine who was angelic, beautiful, passive, docile and selfless. However…

To be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that has no story…..is really a life of death, a death-in-life. The ideal of ‘contemplative purity’ evokes finally, both heaven and the grave.

Moi, Toril (2002) Sexual/Textual Politics, Routledge  p57

We still strive for perfection whether it be for a perfect wrinkle free face, a perfect connection with the divine, the perfect career, body, children, home or relationship. I sit firmly on the other side of the fence and reject perfection for a full, chaotic and messy life. I resent being made to feel anxious about what I lack.

I am therefore not the transcendental signified of the text. My work does not reveal one truth. There is no one final meaning to be got at. Just lots of meanings appearing and disappearing.  In my flower diary there is no definitive image of me to discover – there is no grand meaning.  There is also no god or nirvana – no grand narrative – just life.

• Making the work:

Previous to this project I knew nothing about horticulture. Last spring my attic was full of germinating seeds. I don’t have a garden but the mews where I live was littered with pots of flowers as was my mum’s garden. I sourced flowers and plants on the internet, at garden centres, in florists, at flower shows and growing wild here and across Europe. I spent over a year – in order to encompass all four seasons – finding, growing and photographing the individual flowers which I would later arrange into bouquets. Only the black and white dahlias were not photographed by myself. They were sourced from glass plate negatives taken by my stepmother’s great grandfather.

I used digital SLR, medium and large format cameras to photograph the flowers and vases. Some pictures of individual flowers were made up of 5 or 6 frames stitched together in Photoshop. Most flowers I photographed at least a hundred times. As a result of this work I amassed a huge library of flowers from which I could arrange my bouquets in Photoshop.

The use and style of the text references botanical prints. For exhibition I have presented my photographs in box like frames which show the edges of the prints. I want them to look like museum exhibits – as if an anthropologist has collected them from another world. The woman represented in the diary (like the flowers) comes from an uncivilized world and is only safe behind glass.