‘cut flowers’ 🌷

a collage series of figures, extending on my reverence for botanicals, deepening my enquiry into the presentation of still life.
Cutting, layering, weaving; the series uses a tactile process making use of vintage source materials. These materials were deconstructed and reassembled using paper weave, chromatic collage, and crude collage.



the weaves

a basic “under/over” weave technique takes up space across the plane. The source imagery is fragmented, rejecting the refined assembly, through a scattering pixelation across the image.
We “see through” the formal form and enter a new dimension of still life, inspired by digital pixelation, associated with obscuring or concealing, challenging our notions of formalism within still life.
For precision cuts, I use software and a slicing machine to cut the paper into planned out areas.

I must pay my respects to the original source material: a stunning book from the late 1960s “arranging flowers” by Shozo Sato, that illustrates the most vibrantly coloured flower arrangements and ikebana methods: from rikka, seika and and moribana



chromatic collage

Ikebana arrangements are sculpture; considerations of color, line, form, and function guide the construction of a work.
The resulting forms are varied and unexpected.
The line and form of the flower arrangement is removed and replaced with large bulbous layers, leaving just a silhouetted impression of the former still life. Rather than refined lines, obtuse forms invert the original intention of the source material.
Here, I am consciously rejecting refinement and offering an arrangement that is curved, obtuse, rounded.



crude collage

These were the most fun to make!
These physical collages are crudely cut from vintage flower arranging books; the rough cutting + sticking evokes a sense of naivety + playfulness, stripping away strict form in the source material


 

Fig. 16, 2023, image courtesy of Union Art + Design - acquired for the permanent collection of Charleston’s Place Hotel, South Carolina