Prize Flowers

4x5 film, 2019

The tryptic Prize Flowers explores the ideological power that can be embedded in objects. The photographs depict three treasured artificial flowers I recovered from my childhood home. The silk flowers, tied with swirling plastic ribbons, were given to me in congratulations following childhood figure skating competitions. In the photographs, their artificiality is easily overlooked—it’s not immediately obvious that these flowers are two decades old, but once the pattern of the synthetic fibres are identified, they become somewhat unsettling. The meaning these faux flowers possessed is hidden behind their deceptively realistic appearance—it’s not until their artificiality is identified that questions around their existence and purpose start to arise. The camera facilitates a slippage between perception and reality which reveals the strangeness of their existence.