Flowers

Flowers. Rhythms reacting to blossoms growing and leaves falling. An intrinsic process, purpose-made in our own evolution. It is no surprise we see flowers throughout (a) history of art as a shared experience; a cipher. A symbol of the wheel we are all speeding around, communal life stages, technologies and #goals. It isn’t shared though is it? Pragmatics show us a flower’s maturity, colour, material value and what this can symbolise, yet we all look at them differently; we all look different. Our awe of the natural world denotes us humans alongside raw materials. Our raw-selves; flesh alongside gold, mud and bacteria. We assign value that is relational to the space we occupy, in the time given to us. If space gives us the system to describe value, then how we occupy time is how we might communicate our identity, our output. Our relation to time and space is fluid as time itself. A plurality that cannot be pinned down; flowing from every sound we make, every line we draw, every movement we expel, every relationship we make - collectively and individually. A swell and crest. Flowers. Omnipresent in our journey. They navigate us through time, the moments we spend communicating our output, searching for affinity. An urban japonica leaf, a nurturing hand guiding you. It’s seed pods, small alien umbels hiding among the foliage. Another symbol of our relation to space, our cyclical and momentary value hidden deep within our protecting bodies, our relative expressions and exteriors; our leaf-span. How might we assign value to a flower? A rose, a fibonacci designed by nature; by external forces contained within a relative ecology? Without labour or the hand? A magical life sustaining green and velvet red, not inflated by diplomacy or creed. A (perfect) balance of camouflaged thorns with luscious, alluring petals. It’s meaning to all of us, a perpetual and collective meme of love, beauty and wonder. How then, do we then assign value to gold? Its commodity, its relationship to capitalism in a male designed world. It’s authorship. It’s (perfect) incentive, reassigned from nature to man, the violent extraction and use in technology; the system here has changed. Both valuable, yet neither perfect. We strive to be perfect, live perfectly, or waste time. A levelling of social identity; a means to measure efficiency in space and not efficacy in time. Flowers. What space is perfect then for us to occupy time? A place for taxonomy, to assign value? Clean, white, void of context, uncanny and unnerving. A hospital? A tattoo parlour? Processing a multitude of unique conditions, guests’ bound with the tensions of a pre-designed communal environment; full of solutions designed just for you. We attempt to comprehend value, the cold instruments and their life-changing properties. Caring, nurturing and violent, looking in wonder as we do the rose but with little comfort. A window of tolerance, identities levelled and pre-assigned, to fit the model. Are you red or are you blue? This tension between human essence and the man-made world we occupy keeps bringing us back to blooms. So, always remember the flower, a simple and crude symbol of identity, the memories and value we hold intrinsic. A motif and navigational tool that finds us when we need it in this perpetual cycle of birth, growth, love and mortality.