This Spring I had the opportunity to do an artist residency at La Maison Verte, located in a small rural village in France called Marnay-sur-Seine. The residency is part of a botanical garden in the village called Jardin Botanique. Each day I would go for long walks in the village and gardens, and I was keenly aware of the continual shift of the different blooms of flowers all around me. In the beautiful old house where I stayed, there was a small room adjacent to my bedroom that felt like a kind of liminal in-between space, or a dreamspace. I started to envision the different ways these flowers could transform the room.
Much of my work tends to be very time-intensive, so there was something refreshing about the process of having to work quickly. From the time I picked the flowers, I had only a few hours to install and photograph the work before the flowers would begin to fade. I was very aware of the ephemeral quality of the work and the passing of time. There was something magical about the continual transformation of the space. I left each installation up for one or two days, and would observe and photograph the way that the flowers wilted. I then collected and dried the flowers, and have been using them to create works on paper, similar to herbarium specimens. Currently, I am working on creating and publishing a book of the project to be released in early 2019.
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