Strange Flowers for Unmarked Graves
Floral Arrangement with Chicken Feet and Cow Trachea
In movies we imagine the end of times in the language of barren sepia wastelands populated by nomadic men. They are always dressed like it’s bondage night at the ANTIFA sex club. As it turns out, the fashions of impending death are rather less garish.
We wear face masks and polyurethane gloves to the grocery store, the liquor store.
A young man walks his dog in a vintage gas mask.
An attractive woman pushes a stroller, a silk scarf wrapped around her face.
She makes eye contact with me, nods, as I ride past on my bicycle, my daughter, a mess of pink tulle and melted chocolate, strapped into the seat on the back. It’s a simple gesture that’s intended to convey solidarity, kindness, understanding. But, for an instant, my mind wanders from the white noise of looming death and I imagine that this exchange of glances means something deeper:
Yes.
Now.
Here, in this storm drain.
While our children nap.
Without exchange of names or disease status.
Like those feral things that haunt the city streets, late at night, when the sons of Abraham are in bed.
Her baby wakes, cries.
I ride on.
On the chattering screen they are burying corpses in a mass grave somewhere. New York, I think. But it might be Spain. Or Iran. Or China. Hundreds of dead. Thousands. Men in white mylar suits stand around while backhoes push dirt over the bodies. There is no audio. I wonder if someone recited verses from whatever holy book is appropriate to the region. I wonder if, when this is all over, anyone will visit this patch of dirt bearing synthetic flowers, or whatever colourful trinkets are appropriate to the region.
Late at night coyotes prowl my street, poking around the trash bins. They wander out from the green space near the river’s edge and move south, venture further out each night, emboldened by the paucity of human activity, pushing ever deeper into the heart of the contaminated city.
The neighbour’s cat hasn’t been home for a week.
And then two weeks.
And late at night, while my daughter sleeps, I work in the basement studio, scattering the contents of the meat freezer on the stone floor, sculpting flesh and bone into strange flowers for the dead.
Symbolism and Inspiration
This image is a new iteration in my ongoing efforts to reinvent and reinterpret the motifs of classical still life. I’ve long been fascinated by those old paintings of flower arrangements that were so popular amongst 17th century still life painters. Like all still life arrangements these contain, to greater or lesser extent, a lament about the transience of all things — viewers at the time would have understood the implication that the flowers and all their beauty will not last for very long. These images ought to be taken in the context of the oft-quoted biblical references to the idea that all flesh is like grass. My favourite quote this this effect being this one, from 1 Peter 1:24:
All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is as the flower of grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls away.
Paintings and photographs of flowers remain popular nowadays, of course, when one can buy mass-produced prints of roses and tulips at Ikea or HomeSense or wherever. Sadly, though some of these images are indeed very pretty to look at, it seems to me that they often fail to pay homage to the implicit meditation on death and transience that gave classical flower paintings their sense of weight and depth. With shots like this one I am always trying to recover some of the original philosophical depth of still life, while updating the messaging in a way that (hopefully) resonates with a more contemporary audience.
For this composition I used cow trachea “stems” and chicken foot “blossoms” to create a strange and macabre sort of flower. A central position is given to a chicken foot with a visible sore. (The underlying condition, in case you’re curious, appears to be a bacterial infection called “bumblefoot” that is apparently a rather common affliction amongst the chickens that we eat.) From a creative standpoint I rather like the inclusion of this kind of diseased flesh, in part because it gives some structure to the “flower,” and in part because it reminds of me William Blake’s famous poem, The Sick Rose:
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Here, as in my other images, the tipped cups and containers are intended as reminders of the mortality. In particular, the cup on the left hand side of the composition dangles precariously over the table edge, threatening to tumble downwards into the darkness, reminding the viewer that our grasp on life is often tenuous.
This theme has always been at the core of my work but now, in the age of COVID-19, it has gained a certain amount of urgency for me. Which, of course, brings us to the other symbolic implication of flowers: they are often used to decorate the graves of the dead. The idea of floral arrangements as an homage to the recently deceased has been on my mind a lot lately, in these times where countless corpses are being stored in freezer trucks and ice skating rinks, or interred in mass graves, unmarked, unvisited, without ceremony or song.