Skip to main content

Flower Light

Ann Elias
Eyeline 78/79
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

The Kantian concept that flowers are paradigms of beauty and pleasure is pervasive in everyday culture. For example, the supposed purposeless beauty of flowers is the reason that images of flowers are used as ‘neutral stimuli’ in scientific experiments in the field of abnormal psychology. Their function is to counteract reactions of disgust in people with phobias to ‘aversive’ images, including corpses.1 But in the arts, nearly a hundred years ago, Georges Bataille’s view was that cut flowers were not so very different to dismembered corpses. Having survived the First World War, about which Herbert Read, in A Short Poem for Armistice Day, wrote how ‘men like flowers are cut’, Bataille went on to publish ‘The Language of Flowers’ in Documents (1929). Implicated in the flower’s vitality is its imminent decay and for this anti-romantic writer it was important to remember the origin of the flower: ‘risen from the stench of the manure pile—even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity’.2 

To consider why and how flowers focus the contemporary imagination, and what contemporary artists say through their representations of flowers, this article looks at works by Australians Matthys Gerber and Danie Mellor, and New Zealanders Paul Hartigan and Peter Peryer. What do they make visible about the flower, or of the genre of flowers in art? None of the works reproduced here mimic nature and the flower is not a living thing shown in its habitat. Of the four, only Peryer’s appears naturalistic and connected to the flower as a living entity. Yet even this is a superficial reading of a rose that has been... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Danie Mellor, Picaninny Paradise, 2010

Danie Mellor, Picaninny Paradise, 2010. Pencil, crayon and pastel with glitter, Swarovski crystal and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 143 x 171cm. Private collection, Sydney. Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Western Australia. 

Peter Peryer, Red Rose, 2008

Peter Peryer, Red Rose, 2008. Photograph, 460 x 340mm. Courtesy the artist.