Dystopia Wetlands 21.08.23 // Realisation of accessories for Livia Rita at Southbank Centre

It was a delight as ever creating flower boots for Livia Rita’s creatures at Southbank Centre for her new performance Dystopian Wetlands.

In her own words:

DYSTOPIA WETLANDS is a new interdisciplinary performance by Livia Rita & the Avantgardeners based on the ethereal bio punk EP with the same name. The EP will be released in May 2023 alongside a cli-fi music video trilogy. DYSTOPIA WETLANDS explores cross-species alliances; interweaving our identities with nature and creating a future-focused complicity where nature can rebel.

Livia Rita has been tirelessly cultivating a reputation for subverting music through their tantalising and transformative live performances, merging musicianship and brave choreography with self-sculpted wearables (ArtFashion). This collaborative approach serves to explore the oscillating relationship of gender and nature as we strive for inclusion. During the DYSTOPIA WETLANDS live performance, the audience is invited to immerse themselves within a multisensory fantasy landscape, which provokes collective healing and intimate dreaming together with the natural world. The live band transforms into mossy creatures and lets their musical instruments be more and more taken over by samples and algorithms of natural environments, whilst the dancers metamorphosize into radical creatures, uniting the earthy with their imagination and inviting you on a quest to manifest and test possibilities of ambitious future cross-species identities.

For more of her work, please visit: Livia Rita

Scorched Floral Firescreen 23.09 - 25.09.22 // Strawberry Hill Flower Festival

An annual festival curated by Leigh Chappell and Janne Ford showcasing the very best of British grown flowers and sustainable flower arranging techniques in partnership with Flowers from the Farm. 

Scorched Floral Firescreen was created as a response to the extreme heat of Summer 2022. Although clearly not a functional design, the materials it contains have been well and truly tested. It is made with dried grasses and flowers from Flowers from the Farm growers Char Johnston and dried dahlias from Philippa Stewart.

For more information please visit: Strawberry Hill Flower Festival

Dried Tablescape Demonstration with Flowers from the Farm 09.07.22 // RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Show

Delighted to be asked by Flowers from the Farm - a supportive network of British Flower growers and florists wishing to work with seasonal flowers and sustainable practices - to give a demonstration at their RHS Flower School at the RHS Hampton Court Palace and Garden Show.

All flowers used in the school were to be grown no further than a thirty mile radius away and I was partnered up with Claire at Plant Passion; a Flower Farm just outside of Guildford.

A couple of days before the show, knowing that I wanted to work with flowers which would for the most part be dried or dry out I went to visit her field and make a selection. I was immediately drawn to everything that you cannot find at the market and that was in a dried and drying out stage quite naturally in the field. This included a huge selection of grasses, dock, phacelia, honesty as well as these jumbo helichrysum.

On the demonstration day it was a delight to see the flowers all conditioned and cut by Claire that morning.

Here I am, in a pose akin to traffic control demonstrating a dried tablescape which can be left to dry out and sit as an everlasting artwork. The work can be viewed from all sides and also from the top. It would suit a low lying table or being put somewhere it would not be disturbed and must be out of wind as it is a piece which is balanced.

To construct this I worked with two re-purposed boiler tops, fashioned into bowls by Rye artist Peter Edwards. Dried and curling climbing hydrangea whirls were then balnaced within them. These provide movement in the piece and extra stability between the two bowls, which have very small bases. Two loose hand tied bouquets were then balanced in the bowls and other light flowers, limonium and grasses added in to soften the shape. Within these structures there is also space for jars with floral pins in to support small fresh pockets of flowers which can change more immediately with what is outside. The piece was then completed with a dried allium garland and the start of a fresh achillea chain. All the colours over time would fade but I hoped that the garlands could bring in further movement to work in and through the arrangement and shape of the whirls.

Underneath is a picture of Claire demonstrating how to make a button hole and the Flowers from the farm team, all of whom it was a pleasure to meet and work with.

'The Wild Collective' 13.05 - 29.05.21 // A collaborative Exhibition with OmVed Gardens and Thrown Contemporary

Truly delighted to announce collaborative exhibition as Metafleur with specialist craft gallery Thrown Contemporary and garden and sustainable food education space OmVed Gardens taking place in their gardens and greenhouse in Highgate.

This is our third collaboration together for The Chelsea Fringe, with artworks assembled from around the world via an open Call from thrown.

Expanding the exhibition content and encouraging new ways of looking and participating in the exhibition there will be a host of activities including talks, supper clubs, poetry, dance and musical gathering. It is my pleasure to have been organising performances on the 25 / 26 / 27th May as part of the Events programme. Please find more information and a few lines about how each went beneath.

May 25th, G(Roe)

Choreographed by Andrew Sanger and in collaboration with the dancers.

This performance is a collaboration between Andrew Sanger, musician Josef Berk, and the first-year dance students at Roehampton University. Throughout the creative process the students grew calendula plants from seed and documented their growth patterns to devise movement material. The film ‘Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith’, and the poem ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver also contributed to the creative research undertaken by the students. The work will take audience members on a gentle stroll through the gardens of Omved.

A particular movement / moment that moved me was “Show me your sorrow and I’ll show you mine”as they pointed at each other before dropping into a rolling curtsey. Utter magic to see the dancers melding with the garden, with invitations to follow them individually first before returning to self-supporting growing group structures; an opportunity to let go / grow.

26th, Utopia Collective Dinner

Good Place: A series of interventions inspired by Thomas More’s dinner scene in Utopia and William Morris’s ‘How we live and how we might live.’

A joint Supper Club hosted by Thrown Contemporary and OmVed Gardens, with food by Gilvic.

Good Place (direct Latin translation Utopia) is envisaged and includes performances and objects by Amy and Ben Mcdonnell, Joshua Phillips, Eva Sajovic, Mónica Rivas Velásquez, Portia Winters and Alice McCabe.

Objects and performances were asking: “How do our relationships to each other, the land, food, pattern, governance, perpetual ripeness (one of Morris’ key visual cues) affect our perception of abundance or lack thereof?”

27th May, The Gathering; wild collective music making with Maggie Nicols

Respond to nature in our different rhythms together.

Vocalist Maggie Nicols has been an active participant in the European improvisational community since joining the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the late ’60s. As a co-founder of the Feminist Improvising Group, she has also worked to further women in improvised music, dancing and other creative arts not only by example but through workshops and extensive collaborating.

Maggie Nicols builds confidence to interact collectively inspired by the OmVed garden environment. Everyone is invited to listen or take part in the music making; responding in any medium. Maggie also invited us to find freedom in everyday moments and celebrate the Permaculture Zone 6; unmanaged land or minimal inpiut, an observed zone left wild. Felt like a fitting end via extension to the Wild Collective Exhibition.

More information available via the Wild Collective website: www.wild-collective.com

Invitation image by Vivian Ge - join in with sharing images at #wildcollectivechelseafringe

Blind Horizon or Bookmark found in "The Word for World is Forest” // 14 - 28.03.21

“Blind Horizon or Bookmark found in The Word for World is Forest” is a large hanging work composed of mesh, Venetian blind slats, dried dahlias, Swiss milk bottle tops and small squares of mirror. The starting point for this work was trying to envisage the loss to our collective imagination via mass extinction, which, being completely unable to visualise and slightly overwhelmed by a sense of earnestness, initiated a turn to natural world references and symbolism.

The cut- out blind form is inspired by an ocean sunset and the sense of the sun’s rays hitting the water. Two maquettes of the work (made from re-purposed diary and see – through ribbon) are attached to the piece that went through many different forms. These included a double or reversed sunset, which look like an i and ! next to each other, which felt like a fitting reference to our view and use of the planet.

Whilst the title Blind Horizon is self explanatory the second part is developed from a dystopian book by sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin “The Word for World is Forest.” In this book an aggressive team of men abuse a local race of creatures to harvest natural materials for use on the frazzled and irreparable earth. In the introduction she talks about love vs power and the difficulties of making a work that feels preachy; offering courage via creative complexity when an urgent message must be addressed.

The milk bottle tops here are displayed in series – one complete line of species on the left and remaining doubles from the series on the right. The second series is also mirrored this way, but more gaps emerge as they must be rarer. In this way the collection of milk bottle tops attached try to articulate some of this potential loss and place of choice we sit at now in light of the Climate and Ecological Crisis.

For more information, please visit Window135

Fieldwork I at Kenspace // 27.02 – 28.03.21

Fieldwork I exhibited at Ken artspace, an artist run space in the heart of Kennington, dedicated to a mix of exhibitions, window installations and pop-up events orgnanised by Rob Kesseler, fellow botanical artist, and Agalis Manessi.

Fieldwork I at Ken artspace, photograph by Sebastian Boettcher and Walking Fieldwork I to Ken artspace, with Anny Lytridou through Kennington Park, photographs by Ben Deakin.

Fieldwork I was created as one of two hanging floral tapestries for Glasscloud Gallery in 2020. Fieldwork I is a reflection of an internal landscape and started off with a rough sketch imagining the five seasonal elements wood, fire, earth, metal and air of chi kung practice flowing into a central void. As the work developed via the intuitive drawing of lines with millet and heather the concept behind the work expanded rooting itself in the philosophy of natural farmer Masanobu Fukuoka who advocated for observation and experiments in farming over intellectual knowledge. This piece aims at capturing this inquisitiveness whilst also encouraging exploration of our individual nature and collective responsibility towards our environment.

Cultivar Project 29.06.19 – 16.07.19 // Museum of The Flat Earth, Fogo Island

Cultivar Project 29.06.19 – 16.07.19 // Museum of The Flat Earth, Fogo Island

Having missed the opportunity to work and walk with Amy Ash last year in 2018, due to hostile environment of UK (see floral pilgrimage post) we secured a residency together on Fogo Island, an area in between the coasts we both currently look out from.

Our plan was to draw from physical exploration of the Islands flora and the metaphorical implications of botanical terminology, to explore botanical and cultural hybridization to connect political displacement, communities and nature using Amy’s experience of a hostile environment with new possibilities for future growth as a starting point.

From our base at the former Museum of the Flat Earth we got to work on the Island - card reading, dining at Cod-jigger, blackfly biting coastal exploration, workshop plotting and cyanotyping of our hybridised species:

Floral Pilgrimage yr III // #Blauwhaus Artist Residency, Belgium 25.04.19 - 17.05.19

www.blauwhaus.be

Absolute pleasure to be invited to this residency, exhibition, lecture and collaborative working space set up by Wim Wauman in a Castle in Waasmunster, green green Belgium. The project morphed from being a celebration of female arts and crafts makers / muses with him at the helm as Blue Beard to a working unit of craftspeople, with talks and tours organised exploring local history and Bauhaus ethos. Together we worked towards expanding the heraldic crest of Waasmunster - a mermaid holding a turnip - via many tangential connections found in The Wasteland / Waasland, hyperborea - land of eternal Spring and immortality, flat earth theory, colour blue, trees of heaven for presentation as a parade, featuring performance and installations on May 26th.

Powers of x 10 conceived of by animator Isabel Bouttons and droned by Melvin Vanderstylen at the May Day Picnic, 2019.

As part of the residency, I gave an introduction to my work as The Floral Pilgrim to students at The Academie of Waasmunster and invited class to create their own floral bouquet in a small cone to befit the Monster of Waasmunster, replacing the turnip with something more delectable.

Props for the Parade //

At the Academy I worked with glass sculptor Veerle Verschooren and tattoo artist / sculptor Cardon Lander; to create an illusion of a water source from one section of the groups communal table, with the idea of adding floral touches as an alternative well dressing. The small brown pots, designed to display grass blades are part of it. The full installation will only be revealed after the 26th ;)
The object on the right is a pipe, one of 8 made, hoping to plug in a gap at the Local Museum that has an extensive Happy Smokers display rack but a comparatively limited selection of pipes. These will then form part of an installation on a picnic blanket embroidered with group poem and Waasmonsters created by Ilse Van Roy. One pipe will hang on a walkingstick designated for Wim, designed and conceived of by Warre Mulder and Chantal van Rijt.

Daniel Ost, 2012 - Belgian Floral Art Superstar Installation - at the Roosenberg Abbey, Waasmunster.

Sarah Boulton // Zinc Violets ongoing

Zinc Violets is an ongoing work by my friend and ephemeral artist extraordinaire Sarah Boulton. Together we have collaborated on a few projects - as she now lives in Wales / was giving birth! / was on a residency - I have performed works (normally minimal gestures) on her behalf in London.

She invited me to be part of this project last year, at it’s opening in Masons Yard where Polly Wright and myself laid two identical paper poems down, very slowly at the same time.

Mason’s Yard and Sarah Boulton present an exhibition happening in the space of an evening, comprising of two intangible artworks. One is a prediction and the other, a scent. Both have occurred and will be occurring.

Extract from Press release, Masons Yard

The poems and project relate to a place called Epen in Holland, which given trace element zinc in the local water supply has changed the nature of the local violets, becoming a beloved emblem of the area.

As part of my Floral Pilgrimage pursuits, I am hoping to journey to Epen and find the violets on Sarah’s behalf. She wrote to me to tell me her latest thoughts, after I realised that although the residency at Blauwhaus was close it was too far to be able to visit that trip.

Currently, the next time Alice or Polly does a search in Epen, I am planning to spend the time predicting and every time I remember that I am predicting I will write down a short observation of what I see in front of me wherever I am. I am interested in the distance and these transformative flowers being at the end of the work, stretchable and transformative as it is.

What does a prediction feel like? To me it seems quite unlike most Contemporary Art, and yet a lot about contemporary life.

The flowers are always there in the back of the mind. Influencing and influenced.