Brick flowers got me thinking…
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Depictions of flowers & landscape going wrong & going right.
Driving home after visiting an exhibition, in London traffic beside these beauties — had to take a photo and take a moment to feel into why I loved these so much.
This is a highly personal, short response to human depictions of nature to dig into why I make what I make and what I respond to.
I have seen a number of very (to me) fussy plants cast in ceramic, not to mention fussy paintings and drawings of plants/nature…they bore me with their tedious labouriousness.
I can understand if the observation is a nice experience for an artist, but it doesn’t take me anywhere new, it often just looks like a display of ‘correctness’, technique without depth of purpose.
THIS is something else —flowers in vases, how to achieve that in BRICK. The chunky leaves, the seams going through the vessel. I just absolutely love them and how brick is so, so far from a leaf or petal. And how brick with mortar are far from a fine vase. I hope to inspect these closer.
Annotated botanical drawings have a purpose beyond imagery, for instance — thus floating in a white field become interesting — and I am a sucker for chintz, but that is flowers removed from nature, put into unnatural patterns and floating on a colour field.
Plants are wonderful, fussy depictions of them, less so — to reinterpret, work with form and material to devise a different visual language of the natural world + bonus points for some kind of reference to our complex relationship with plants & flowers — I like that and it feels powerful.
Here are some examples…
