NAKED FLORA

EXHIBITION HISTORY

2018 Human non Human. MAAS Museum of Applied Arts. Sydney, NSW, Australia. Sound by Gary Warner.
2018 Divided Worlds. Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art. The Jam Factory, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
2014 Uncovered: Hidden Pleasures of the Day. Blacktown Arts Centre. Blacktown, NSW, Australia.
2013 Undressing a flower. William Wright Artist Projects. Sydney, NSW, Australia

FROM THE SERIE NAKED FLORA

"The flower petals serve as bridal beds which the Creator had so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with the greater solemnity." - Karl Linnaeus, 1729

According to Karl Linnaeus – the father of taxonomy, in his text about the wedding of plants, or plants ‘foreplay’, the Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum (1729) ,the petals in a flower are the bridal beds and the calyx is the wedding chamber. By counting how many stamens (or “men in a marriage”) and how many pistils (or wives), he invented the Sexual System for the classification of plants, the Systema Naturae (1735), still in use. “Monoandria: A man in a marriage. Diandria, Two men in the same marriage", and so on, until “Polyandria: Twenty men or more in the same bridal chamber with one and the same woman.”

For this body of work I have ‘undressed’ a variety of flowers, counted how many “wives and husbands” each have, and then proceeded to photograph them ‘naked’ using deep focus photography. This series is the newest addition to the collection of the Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO), presented at the Biennale of Sydney 2012.

English