Gallery 3 - Flowers

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- Fallen Roses
- Gyneaceum V
- Gyneaceum VI
- Marine Tulips
- The Oculist
- The Wound

I do not trust symbols, but enjoy the freedom that their treachery can give me. In this context my early flower paintings were not life enhancing and naturalistic. Rather, they were artificial mental embellishments representing the tradtions of Western Ornamentality. The Gynaeceum Series presented knowledge about the hidden structure of our bodies.

I suppose the paintings are about a poetic epistemology, amongst other things. Our organs and tissues carry such an enormous weight of value as metaphor that it simply overwhelms our perceptions of their biological functions. So, I decided to use flowers to express our bodies' beauty, fragility, mortality and mystery. I am using a metaphor to discuss other metaphors. Roses, posspies and iris become head, heart and loins.

After this series I focussed in on the traditional poetic metaphor of flowers and mortality stressing the fragility of blooms by piercing the petals and suspending the flowers. They became a sinister floral fetish. Recently I have pushed flowers into a marine context shifting scale and presenting the blossoms as giant sea creatures, terrible in their beauty.

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