Twelve Months of Flowers:
Inspired by the work of Robert Furber’s (1674 - 1765) etched series Twelve Months of Flowers, I explore the notion that ideas, like energy, never die, instead just shuffle their once-position into a different arrangement. In my series of twelve paintings, by the same name, I include some of Casteels’ European flowers, interspersed with Australian indigenous plants and newly discovered species from around the world, each bloom in the specific month that I ‘arrange' them within.
With an interest in theories such as Foucault’s Historical Systems of Thought, I endeavour to navigate through and repurpose visual history derived from enlightenment thinking and enquire into that unsettled space between propositional ideas and imbedded beliefs. By making and realising paintings I consider the appearance, demise and reformation of ideas, as contained within visual artefacts, and propose my own arrangements of newly formed, unsettled configurations.
Furber adapted the paintings of Pieter Casteels III (1684-1749) in order to make a series of etchings that would serve to sell seeds. I have taken cues from the historical roles of drawing and printmaking to concretise and disseminate one way of knowing the world, and invent a painting process employing brush and rag accrual and removal of paint that asserts the painted mark as neither quite painted, nor drawn or printed, but somehow, of all three modalities at once.
The paintings are propositional moments of congregation - new and old, here and there - now found in one painted place and altogether making something worthwhile of their current assemblage.
