Yuki Aruga (part two)

Sweet Dreams, 2011

Everlasting; Circular Fragmentation, 2011

Untitled; Circle 1, 2011

Perpetual Bloom, 2011

Well, I told you to expect more from the multi-disciplined artist Yuki Aruga and here it is.  Her beautiful oil paintings are so evocative of the roses in them that I can almost smell the heady scent.  Intoxicating.

Yuki Aruga (part one)

Sustained in Motion

States

Infinite

I love animals and I don't eat them so you might think having a 'bit of a thing' about taxidermy is perhaps a little odd.  Well in this case the talented Yuki Aruga uses a delicate touch and the addition of fresh flowers for a 21st century take on the ancient art of taxidermy. Floristry and dead animals... strange but wonderful.

The Triffids are coming

Triffids in West Lothian?  Actually a quiet, hidden glade where curling tendrils of ferns have colonised to create this magical emerald landscape.  Of course it immediately made me think of the 1951 post apocalyptic novel by John Wyndham.

This is also an opportunity to mention the work of the artist Catherine Charnock.  She is from South Africa but now lives and works in Oxford. This mixed media drawing depicts triffid-like dandelions in a scene of desolation.  You can see more of her work here

'The frogs are coming' 2007

Yedda Morrison

This work takes as its starting point the human desire for permanence, a desire made acute by the inevitability of our passing. If photography itself is a manifestation of this desire, our attempt to arrest or “still life,” plastic plants and flowers are a low-rent corollary. Suspended mid bloom and scattered throughout graveyards and empty parlors, they offer the promise of perennial youth, an eternal flowering, life ever after. Fake flowers both immortalize and render static the natural world. As such, they articulate a crisis between beauty and horror, desire and loss, artificiality and “the natural.”

In our fall from the “pre” or “no” time of Eden, we have landed squarely in the artificial garden, the stilled remains of paradise. These sights of frozen or no time and the scale, duration and technology that make them possible, work to articulate a world where boundaries between the real and the artificial are increasingly blurred. If, in our contemporary moment, we are experiencing a gradual substitution of the machine for the body/mind, the image for the thing, and the simulation of the environment for the environment itself, then perhaps we are realizing Robert Smithson’s “frozen actuality,” the hallucinatory disjunction where “nothing is known but the impenetrable surfaces,” where “the artificial ingenuity of time allows no return to nature.”

Bioposys are reconstituted artificial flowers and plants, mutant strains, improbable and permanent hybrids. The larger pieces attempt to envision a constellation of flower bombs, offering glimpses into possible futures of plastic and mishap. In others, the crude undersides begin to show through, revealing the cheap materials and human labor that ultimately destroy any illusions of “real.” And they offer more questions than answers; what happens when the “artificial” becomes a stand it for the “real?” When our pursuit of perfection, symmetry, longevity leads to ecological disaster? What is our relationship to “nature” as it mutates, rebels or ceases to exist? And what if we find the mutations themselves desirable? What constitutes beauty in an age of environmental crisis? Is simulation the new preservation? If a “real” plant is a statement from another time, are we already after nature?

-Yedda Morrison, August 2007

Yedda Morrison is a visual artist and writer from San Francisco.  These scanned images of artificial flowers from her Bioposy series have an ethereal beauty and a dark and tangible softness.    They entice me to the shadows beyond, there's a mystery there  waiting to be discovered.  They are reminiscent of 17th century Dutch still life paintings but with a luminescence that makes them entirely modern and other-worldly.  You can see more of Yedda's work on her website

Feast the eyes (and soul)

Lys Cheri, 2008

Amaryllis Rubis, 2008

Pivoine Grand Jour, 2009

Tulipes, Baiser Rose et Baiser Rouge, 2009

Chrysantheme Flamboyant, 2008

Lys d'Hiver, 2008

Sandrine Bihorel is a French sculptor who turned her hand to painting to create these large decorative panels.  The fusion of clay and paint gives these pieces a textural surface that has been described as old embossed leather and the patterns peeking out from behind the blooms are inspired by her collections of fabrics.  For me they are reminiscent of many things: the glossy cracked ceramics of my childhood, travels to exotic souks and heady Moorish nights, the smell of mysterious Victorian volumes depicting strange and wonderful floral specimens.  I'm never quite sure whether I prefer the beautiful printed textile motifs or the curling, fluid lines of the flowers but in truth I can't imagine one existing without the other by her hand.  You can see more of her work here