Bowing to the Mystery

I am fascinated by the tension between apparent opposites, such as, strength and fragility, or timelessness and impermanence and wildflowers are the most perfect expression of this duality. The Queen Anne’s Lace wildflower looks especially beautiful when it is pressed—the crooked stems and the delicate shapes of the flowers feel very emotional and expressive. And because pressing flowers has, for hundreds of years, been a kind of women’s domestic art, it’s traditionally been small and contained. I wanted to see if I could make large work using the pressed flowers as a “mark-making tool” to express big abstract ideas like transcendence or abundance.

I also think often about the lives of flowers outside of human awareness—like in the dark at night. In most of the work in this series, I’ve painted the flowers black and given them a shimmering halo of powdered graphite within a blue black field to express the spirit of the flowers themselves as well as the mystery of the unknown that nighttime so often represents for humanity.