celestialmazer

An event in Castlemilk Park my sister and I worked at and created fairy homes for. We created (with a some help from the fairies of course!) ten different fairy homes inspired by indigenous homes of ten different commonwealth countries.  The event facebook album , Friends of Castlemilk park Forest Fairy event facebook album , Friends of Castlemilk   Fairy fantasy takes flight for tiny folk Link to the Evening Times article for the ‘Fairies of the Commonwealth’ event we created fairy pieces for.

A persistent, old example of floriography in pop culture I found interesting is the use of flower meanings in Hamlet - specifically Ophelia’s symbolic handing out of narrative appropriate flowers to characters in the play. This scene is well discussed, as she distributes blooms (or objects which in her grief and madness she refers to as flowers) clearly relating to things such as adultery and remembrance. As this is already a well analysed section, I decided to invert my research and collate a bouquet of meanings that were appropriate to Ophelia herself. Inspired by the tradition of ‘memento mori’ I created paper flowers to form a ‘memento mori’ for Ophelia, capturing them at a moment in time that connotes her drowning. The flowers I chose to include to describe her: honesty for honesty, yew for sorrow, yellow chrysanthemum for slighted love, white lilac for youthful naivety, daisy for innocence, dead leaves for melancholy, grass for obedience and blue violet for faithfulness. Flowers for Ophelia

  'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a semi-autobiographical short story  by Charlotte Perkins  Gilman about a woman who is driven to madness by the mental health treatments of the oppressive society she lives in, and her obsession with the yellow wallpaper that lines the room she is confined to. I explored a series of outcomes in response to the text including textual pieces, illustrative pieces and more abstract sculptural work. The Yellow Wallpaper

I based this idea on the documentations of botanist Carl Linnaeus who charted plants which bloom at every hour of the day and night. The idea is to remove all numerical information as indication of time and replace it with a natural experience experience of time via a blooming plant - our conditioning of how to read a clock being strong enough to make this flower clock with working hands easy enough to understand. The images are physically arranged on the clock-face to blend into each other making time and how nature sits in it more flexible than the precision imposed with a traditional clock. Starting at one working clockwise, the flowers are as follows: alpine sow thistle and profuse flowering pink, yellow goatsbeard, dandelion, the ‘4 o’clock’ marvel of Peru and madwort, day lily, hawkweed and geranium, naked stalked poppy, red pimpernel and upright bindweed, field marigold, egyptian fig marigold and cypress vine, star of bethlehem and night flowering catch-fly, and the large flowered cactus. Flower Clock

Part of an exploration of language and lettering. A guide on how the nonsense poem and its invented words are to be spoken. Rewritten phonetically according to Lewis Carroll’s guidelines for pronunciation, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s symbols for pronunciation.  Images are from a mixed media book I made about Jabberwocky, investigating the atmosphere,meaning and tensions between sense and nonsense in the poem.  Jabberwocky