Oh me, oh my it has been a lush and wonderful Spring here in the Midwest. After deep Winter, polar vortex and a slow emergence from hibernation we have been surrounded by growth. Buds slowly opening, lavishing us with their fragrant blooms, reawakening our senses to the smells of a living, breathing earth. It is so easy to forget how deeply I am effected by the changes in our environment, how easily mood can dip and shift as the clouds pass over the sun, winds whip and snow cloaks. But here we are, we have finally arrived in the time of flowers. It begins slowly and we watch for crocuses, daffodils, tulips. We hold our breath as the magnolias begin to bud, a slow and steady crescendo to a brief extravagance. Then there are apple and cherry blossoms, flowering trees drop their snow and we amble toward irises, columbine, inching to allium, poppies then settle into hydrangeas, cone flowers and black eyed susans. A brief summer submerges us, plunges us into her essence, a scent enlivening yet fleeting. We are out of doors, we commune, alive with the wonder of our world.
As the seasons shift from one to another I always think about the different ways to harness the spirit of a season. Is there a way to store a piece of each season within to draw on as needed? How do we reference the moment we are not in? Flowers, such fragile structures, represent phases of the season from which they hail. They are alive with that moment in time where nature has coddled them under her eves, nurtured them along to the exact moment where they burst forth chanting March, April, May, June and so on. How exactly then might we capture that moment in time? Is it possible? Is it possible to preserve what slips through our fingers so readily? Can we pluck something from its environment yet still preserve the essence of what it is?
Flower preservation has a long and storied history and methodology from drying to pressing to pounding to waxing. For eons artists have sought to harness a bit of the botanical spirit, to represent the beauty and quintessence of what so stimulates our senses. The work of Carmon Almon enchants me to no end. I remember discovering her on a steamy summer day, feeling how deeply she understood flowers as her renderings depict them so closely yet go further to the place beyond. Not only does she enshrine their beauty and spirit, but she reveals a haunting under layer that speaks of their power to hold our attention. As flowers bloom all around I feel compelled to enter this fray of harnessing a bit of that botanical essence.
But how and what exactly is it that I seek to represent? There is a ghostly and ancient spirit that lives and breaths within each flower, a phantom that utters a primal syllable tickling us awake. When we pull a flower from her place, uproot her from her life blood, how might we do her justice as her life is snuffed out? I am intrigued by this effort. Dusting dirt from roots, I think about how we can repair something we have intentionally destroyed. How might I stitch her bits back together, salvage the colors leaching from her petals? It is this that I have begun to explore, slowly experimenting with various forms of flower preservation most to imperfect effect.
I have pounded floral bits into hot press watercolor paper, dunked delicate blooms into 130 degree wax, sandwiched weeds and wild bouquets between heavy pages and strung a garland of blooms across my kitchen. The results are indeed intriguing and layered and reference the spirit of the flower, but I am left wondering if there is a way to mend that spirit into completion? To shout her beauty from the page and have it echo back with a resounding, "YES, I am still alive!" As we destroy our fragile eco-systems and deplete our quality of life efforts to preserve what was steadily emerge. People plot the rewilding of large swaths of land, freeze their wounded bodies in a cryonic hope that someday somebody will be able to restore their health. And in that vein, I continue to fear the snuffing out of our blooms and how once they are gone we might remember them and later still, bring them back.