Graveyard Flowers

The storm came and left the city, for a time, in darkness.

Hydro lines down. Trees down. Basements flooded in low lying areas.

And, in the days that followed, I went biking through debris-littered streets. I found these artificial flowers in a storm drain, along a major thoroughfare. Five hundred meters to the east, a cemetery; five hundred metres to the west, another.

I wouldn’t normally feel comfortable with the idea of taking the decorations from someone’s grave for an art project. But, in this case, it seemed justifiable; there was no way to return them to their rightful place and it seemed clear that they were destined for a landfill. And so I brushed the mud from this strange bouquet and carried it home with me.

There’s something telling about the choice to decorate graves with artificial flowers.

It’s as if using real plants hits a bit too close to home. Cut flowers wither and die so quickly… And maybe the quickness of the affair hits a raw nerve, serves as too jarring a reminder of what’s been taken from us, of the toll extracted by time and chance. Maybe we perceive artificial flowers as more permanent, as immortal, somehow.

It’s a lie, of course.

Artificial flowers, like their organic counterparts, will inevitably wither and die. The sun’s rays will drain their petals of colour. Plastic stems erode and dissolve under the pressure of rain and time. Or the winds will come, dislodge the flowers, toss them into a gutter somewhere.

We decorate graves to honour the dead. And to remind the living of the transience of beauty. This was, also, my intentions with this series of images.