Still Life of Flowers
2023
One day, I saw the trash cans spilling over with plastic flowers that once laid on the tombstones. I thought: Vanitas! Memento Mori! The 17th Century Dutch Still-Lifes. What is the death of plastic flowers?
After collecting the plastic flowers I submerged them in wax and placed them in an open casket. Viewing of the work becomes a ritual akin to a funeral, envisioning a procession lasting a thousand years—the time it takes for plastic to decompose.
Plastic flowers collected from discarded cemetery arrangements were submerged in wax and placed in an open casket. The work engages with material longevity and ritualized viewing, evoking a contemporary Vanitas: a meditation on decomposition, temporality, and the afterlife of synthetic objects.
