Bouquet Series

This series celebrates Australian flora. It explores its resilience, as fragile or subtle as it might be.

Bouquet I

Bouquet I uses glass circles to capture the watery reflections of plants along Karrawirra Pari. Emerging from the water circles, the delicate copper petals and stamina seem to float above humans' attempts to control what happens on the banks of this river.

The work reflects on plants' resilience in the face of destruction/restoration, as well as on the fleeting transience of their blossoming. Barely above the water line, best captured under a certain light, what lingers are memories and dreams of possible plant futures to come.

Bouquet II (Winner, 2nd prize, Mark Butler Art Awards, 2025)

Bouquet II draws inspiration from the blossoms around Torrens Lake—the ones that were, the ones that are and the ones that will be.

The concrete base and the clear glass semicircles bear witness to the contained waters of this artificial lake, while the outlined copper-wire petals allude to the environmental cost of its creation. These represent the remnants of pools, flows and plants past.

The copper flowers and glass petals speak of what resiliently remains, and of (re)vegetation efforts. Their intricacy is also a nod to the recreational and health ideals that led to the creation of the lake and park lands in the first place.

By capturing the tension between our impulse to shape and/or protect the environment and the unintended consequences of our actions, Bouquet II questions the wider destructive/restorative interplay between us and our environments.

Bouquet V

Born from the remnants of a house renovation, Bouquet V gathers offcuts and leftover materials into a fragile offering. The work reflects on how acts of building are also acts of unbuilding, echoing how the clearing of native vegetation in our cities to make way for ornamental species, like the magnolia, leaves both absence and possibility.
The glass blooms refract what endures while the outlined copper-wire petals bear witness to what has toppled. They represent fragments of plants past. Yet, within this assemblage of scraps and salvaged matter, new growth stirs, and out of the rubble, a delicate ecology reassembles itself.
In reworking discarded materials into a delicate floral, the piece explores the generative possibilities that emerge when we attend to what remains. Bouquet V listens for the quiet persistence of native ecologies—for their capacity to speak from the interstices and take root in cracks, gutters and forgotten corners. It celebrates the resilience of the living world: how life continues, reconfigures and insists, again and again, on breathing through the ruins.

More coming soon.