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FLORA IN FLUX
"consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin" Matthew 6:28-29
Maybe then, only by tending soil, anticipating frost, and waiting through seasons can we reclaim the original meaning of a flower. Imported blooms, however perfect, remain hollowed-out signifiers, disconnected from the rhythms and rituals of their natural cycle.
This text discusses how flowers and art have become products of valuation systems masking their origins in market and emotional projection. What once seemed like symbols of truth now appear, to me, as performances of it.
This reflection began during repeated visits to Manhattan’s flower district on 28th Street. Afterwards, I’d take the subway home, scrolling through florists’ $350 bouquets on Instagram. At the same time, I was making work in my studio, then walking through Chelsea’s white-walled corridors on my way to the gallery. Each space holds objects priced in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Slowly, a question began to materialise: when we buy flowers or art, are we purchasing the thing itself, or our own projection onto it?
Since moving to New York, my love of flowers has withered. They feel overdetermined: aesthetic objects stripped of spontaneity or intimacy. Working in a commercial gallery has had a similar effect on my relationship with art. Both now appear as illusions of significance, engineered for transaction. Beauty persists, yes, but often as a pretext, a surface beneath which global economies of taste and power quietly operate.
This reflection began during repeated visits to Manhattan’s flower district on 28th Street. Afterwards, I’d take the subway home, scrolling through florists’ $350 bouquets on Instagram. At the same time, I was making work in my studio, then walking through Chelsea’s white-walled corridors on my way to the gallery. Each space holds objects priced in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Slowly, a question began to materialise: when we buy flowers or art, are we purchasing the thing itself, or our own projection onto it?
Since moving to New York, my love of flowers has withered. They feel overdetermined: aesthetic objects stripped of spontaneity or intimacy. Working in a commercial gallery has had a similar effect on my relationship with art. Both now appear as illusions of significance, engineered for transaction. Beauty persists, yes, but often as a pretext, a surface beneath which global economies of taste and power quietly operate.
I am attempting to resolve, or at least map, the discomfort I feel within these systems. It is not a rejection of, but an inquiry into how it becomes mediated, packaged, and sold back to us. In writing this, I am maybe searching for a kind of mental resistance.
Unlike a painting or sculpture, whose value can be discerned through longevity or ownership, flowers stem their worth through emotional charge and their very perishability. But even that perishability is now synthetic. Flowers are flown in from Ecuador, Kenya, and Holland; boxed, cooled, trimmed to perfection... In fact, over 80% of cut flowers sold in the United States, some 2.2 billion stems annually are imported. In just the first two months of this year, over a billion flowers passed through U.S. customs. This system strips them of seasonality and context, they arrive ready-to-wear, no trace of origin.
So, If we can no longer distinguish between a tulip grown in upstate New York and one engineered in a Colombian greenhouse, and if we sometimes prefer the latter, what does that say about how we value nature, care, and authenticity?
Value has long been tied to context, who made it, why, and under what conditions. But today, these contextual markers have become their own form of aesthetic capital. Value is no longer something we discern through personal connection but something we inherit, pre-assigned through condition. We’re no longer engaging with flowers or artworks on their own terms, but through a framework that tells us how to feel, what to notice, and what to revere. The flower doesn’t simply evoke sentiment; it performs it. The artwork doesn’t just suggest significance; it’s already been framed as such. Both are reduced to surfaces onto which we subconsciously project the values we've been taught to recognise.
A rose grown under fluorescent lights for Valentine’s Day is not the same as one clipped from a grandmother’s garden. Though they may look identical, their meaning shifts with origin. Just as replication can strip art of aura, it can hollow out the symbolic weight of the flower.
Maybe then, only by tending soil, anticipating frost, and waiting through seasons can we reclaim the original meaning of a flower. Imported blooms, however perfect, remain hollowed-out signifiers, disconnected from the rhythms and rituals of their natural cycle.
But maybe the real question is: why does this go unnoticed, or worse, unbothered. Vanitas painting feels newly urgent. Once a Calvinist warning against excess, its skulls, cut flowers, and overripe fruit symbolised the transience of worldly pleasure. In today’s hyper-capitalist image economy, that message reads less as moralistic than prophetic. Artists like Cecily Brown, Janice McNab, and Jaylen Pigford revisit these tropes: melting ice cream, sugar skulls, decaying blooms, reminders of beauty’s impermanence. My own series, Flora in Flux, continues this dialogue: vacuum-packed flowers soaked in glycerin, suspended between preservation and decay. They hover in airplane mode. These works aren’t about mourning loss, but confronting the conditions under which we attempt to preserve it. I’ve been getting quite into Bible quotes lately, not in a religious sense, but for the way they seem to speak in antonyms to my present.
Take Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” I’ve been holding onto that line, not as comfort, but almost as a challenge. It speaks of unlaboured beauty, of nature as something effortless and abundant. On the surface, this verse from Matthew 6:28: sounds like a gentle meditation on beauty. But read in the context of the full sermon, it’s a rebuke. A warning. It sits alongside a much bigger conversation about material greed, about people obsessed with consuming, about the futility of worrying over how we appear and what we own.
Within that frame, I came across an article citing data from the Springtide Institute: 81% of Gen Z believe in a higher power, yet nearly half attend religious services rarely or not at all. In a world dominated by algorithms and rational systems, perhaps what we’re seeing is a quiet return to projection, a hunger to assign meaning beyond the material. Flowers and art operate in this same space: as objects we saturate with ritual, belief, and longing. Their value, like faith, doesn’t live in the object itself, but in what we need it to be. We inherit their contexts but rarely question them.
This, then, is the tension I keep circling: the things we reach for to feel something real, flowers, faith, art, have all been quietly co-opted by the same machinery of value we pretend they transcend. And still, we hold onto them. Not because they are untouched, but because they help us touch something, however briefly, beyond ourselves. But perhaps, there’s another side.
In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is not a surface phenomenon but a perceptual event that draws us outward. Beauty, she writes, invites fairness by redistributing our attention, pulling us toward justice. I hold onto this because it suggests that, despite commodification, despite logistics and gloss, beauty might still carry an ethical charge. That a flower, however staged, or a painting, however priced, might still arrest us. Still provoke care. Still momentarily reorder perception. If projection is inevitable, then perhaps the answer isn’t to reject beauty, but to reclaim how we see through it. This condition isn’t unique to flowers or art, it feels symptomatic of a broader cultural shift. The impulse to preserve has replaced the impulse to engage. We collect without fully seeing, document without absorbing, curate without feeling. Meaning becomes something we accumulate, rather than encounter.
I’ve been thinking about how this extends into the digital. Preservation has become an instinct divorced from intention. We no longer archive to remember, but to accumulate images, objects, gestures, estranged from their original contexts. This is not care but choreography: an automated performance of value, in which presence is displaced by proof. In this framework, both flowers and artworks are not engaged with, but staged, held briefly in view before being absorbed into systems of circulation and forgetting. And yet, behind that performance is something tender. A desire to connect. To hold onto something fleeting. Maybe that’s why I still love flowers, even as I critique them. Why I still believe in beauty, even as I question its machinery. Because even hollowed-out symbols can sometimes still hold feeling. Even staged beauty can catch us off guard.
Perhaps the work, then, is not to abandon these forms but to resist the flattening. To notice more. To ask what we’re really reaching for when we reach for the camera, the bouquet, the painting. And to find ways, however small, to stay present inside the gesture.
Unlike a painting or sculpture, whose value can be discerned through longevity or ownership, flowers stem their worth through emotional charge and their very perishability. But even that perishability is now synthetic. Flowers are flown in from Ecuador, Kenya, and Holland; boxed, cooled, trimmed to perfection... In fact, over 80% of cut flowers sold in the United States, some 2.2 billion stems annually are imported. In just the first two months of this year, over a billion flowers passed through U.S. customs. This system strips them of seasonality and context, they arrive ready-to-wear, no trace of origin.
So, If we can no longer distinguish between a tulip grown in upstate New York and one engineered in a Colombian greenhouse, and if we sometimes prefer the latter, what does that say about how we value nature, care, and authenticity?
Value has long been tied to context, who made it, why, and under what conditions. But today, these contextual markers have become their own form of aesthetic capital. Value is no longer something we discern through personal connection but something we inherit, pre-assigned through condition. We’re no longer engaging with flowers or artworks on their own terms, but through a framework that tells us how to feel, what to notice, and what to revere. The flower doesn’t simply evoke sentiment; it performs it. The artwork doesn’t just suggest significance; it’s already been framed as such. Both are reduced to surfaces onto which we subconsciously project the values we've been taught to recognise.
A rose grown under fluorescent lights for Valentine’s Day is not the same as one clipped from a grandmother’s garden. Though they may look identical, their meaning shifts with origin. Just as replication can strip art of aura, it can hollow out the symbolic weight of the flower.
Maybe then, only by tending soil, anticipating frost, and waiting through seasons can we reclaim the original meaning of a flower. Imported blooms, however perfect, remain hollowed-out signifiers, disconnected from the rhythms and rituals of their natural cycle.
But maybe the real question is: why does this go unnoticed, or worse, unbothered. Vanitas painting feels newly urgent. Once a Calvinist warning against excess, its skulls, cut flowers, and overripe fruit symbolised the transience of worldly pleasure. In today’s hyper-capitalist image economy, that message reads less as moralistic than prophetic. Artists like Cecily Brown, Janice McNab, and Jaylen Pigford revisit these tropes: melting ice cream, sugar skulls, decaying blooms, reminders of beauty’s impermanence. My own series, Flora in Flux, continues this dialogue: vacuum-packed flowers soaked in glycerin, suspended between preservation and decay. They hover in airplane mode. These works aren’t about mourning loss, but confronting the conditions under which we attempt to preserve it. I’ve been getting quite into Bible quotes lately, not in a religious sense, but for the way they seem to speak in antonyms to my present.
Take Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” I’ve been holding onto that line, not as comfort, but almost as a challenge. It speaks of unlaboured beauty, of nature as something effortless and abundant. On the surface, this verse from Matthew 6:28: sounds like a gentle meditation on beauty. But read in the context of the full sermon, it’s a rebuke. A warning. It sits alongside a much bigger conversation about material greed, about people obsessed with consuming, about the futility of worrying over how we appear and what we own.
Within that frame, I came across an article citing data from the Springtide Institute: 81% of Gen Z believe in a higher power, yet nearly half attend religious services rarely or not at all. In a world dominated by algorithms and rational systems, perhaps what we’re seeing is a quiet return to projection, a hunger to assign meaning beyond the material. Flowers and art operate in this same space: as objects we saturate with ritual, belief, and longing. Their value, like faith, doesn’t live in the object itself, but in what we need it to be. We inherit their contexts but rarely question them.
This, then, is the tension I keep circling: the things we reach for to feel something real, flowers, faith, art, have all been quietly co-opted by the same machinery of value we pretend they transcend. And still, we hold onto them. Not because they are untouched, but because they help us touch something, however briefly, beyond ourselves. But perhaps, there’s another side.
In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is not a surface phenomenon but a perceptual event that draws us outward. Beauty, she writes, invites fairness by redistributing our attention, pulling us toward justice. I hold onto this because it suggests that, despite commodification, despite logistics and gloss, beauty might still carry an ethical charge. That a flower, however staged, or a painting, however priced, might still arrest us. Still provoke care. Still momentarily reorder perception. If projection is inevitable, then perhaps the answer isn’t to reject beauty, but to reclaim how we see through it. This condition isn’t unique to flowers or art, it feels symptomatic of a broader cultural shift. The impulse to preserve has replaced the impulse to engage. We collect without fully seeing, document without absorbing, curate without feeling. Meaning becomes something we accumulate, rather than encounter.
I’ve been thinking about how this extends into the digital. Preservation has become an instinct divorced from intention. We no longer archive to remember, but to accumulate images, objects, gestures, estranged from their original contexts. This is not care but choreography: an automated performance of value, in which presence is displaced by proof. In this framework, both flowers and artworks are not engaged with, but staged, held briefly in view before being absorbed into systems of circulation and forgetting. And yet, behind that performance is something tender. A desire to connect. To hold onto something fleeting. Maybe that’s why I still love flowers, even as I critique them. Why I still believe in beauty, even as I question its machinery. Because even hollowed-out symbols can sometimes still hold feeling. Even staged beauty can catch us off guard.
Perhaps the work, then, is not to abandon these forms but to resist the flattening. To notice more. To ask what we’re really reaching for when we reach for the camera, the bouquet, the painting. And to find ways, however small, to stay present inside the gesture.