Art
Dried Flowers Are Arranged into Passageways and Processions in Installations by Rebecca Louise Law
For millennia, dried flowers have been prepared for a vast array of uses ranging from decoration and fragrance to pigments and medicine. British artist Rebecca Louise Law taps into our perennial fascination with florals for her monumental, immersive installations. Exploring our relationship with the natural environment and the way blooms and botanicals have influenced cultures throughout history, her reinterpretations of existing architecture encourage the viewer to move around the space in a new way.
In Parma, she draws inspiration from the city’s culinary and medicinal history for “Florilegum,” and in Brittany, France, she was invited to reimagine the Château de la Roche-Jagu’s grand banquet hall. For “The Womb,” visitors walked inside a room delineated by delicate strands of flowers and approached a cocoon-like form in the center, suggesting a space that is simultaneously protective, potent, and fragile. By hand-sewing stems and fronds together and wrapping them carefully in thin wire, she constructs lengthy ribbons of foliage that can be draped from a framework to create long, curtain-like expanses or colorful volumes at various heights.
You can visit “Florilegium” at Chiesa di San Tiburzio in Parma, Italy, and “Awakening” at the Honolulu Museum of Art will be on view through September 10, 2023. Explore more of Law’s work on her website and follow updates on Instagram.
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