Wildflowers picked on walks with Bea

I try to make photographs that feel like a gift to the viewer, which seems important at the moment. The process by which I’ve arrived at this work photographing flowers has come out of the everyday gifts given to me through being a part of my family. These may be photographs that sit within the tradition of the floral still life, but around the moment of the making of the image is movement, exploration and the experience of looking for flowers with my daughter. It’s an activity at once transient and timeless, something we all may have done and which resonates through literature and history. Flowers are pretty, yes, a simple pleasure, but flowers are also fragile, raw, sexy, fleshy, haunted by myths and stories and flagrant in their colour.

Flowers matter. Flowers are the risky link in the continuity of life. They are symbolically eloquent in the history of art. But I don’t want to hit the viewer over the head with these clear resonances. I want them to enjoy the speechlessness of the image; the strangeness the image has is a consequence of the processes I’ve developed to make them. These are representations of flowers but they are also signs of a complex improvisation with chemicals, paper, light and time. I don’t know what the image is going to be like at the start of the process; each one is a small revelation. Sometimes the strangeness of the resultant image positions the everyday motif of the flowers in a new hybrid space between the chemical and natural; a fusion of the tradition of art that celebrates the transience of flowers, and a process that steals them away into an uncanny, chromatic image of an apparently permanent and artificial afterlife.

The tension between transience and illusion of permanence is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. The collision between natural and human technologies cannot be sidestepped at the moment and the simple motif of the flower struck me as an important site within which to position and explore this tension. What I discovered as the physical terrain available to me shrunk, is a compensatory expansion of the intimate spaces of domestic life and the local, which have granted me the gift of absorption into the everyday wildness of the world close to me, and the people I care for and who care about me - these images are flower of them, and for everyone.