I wanted to produce a work that one could be immersed in. My mother sold poppies for years for the British Legion, our home had a season of poppies each year, and in those days you had to put the poppies together by hand, stem, petals, black centre button, over and over again filling boxes for the street sellers, so it didn’t worry me that some of the picked flowers fell apart and were fragmented, generally my work centres on gathering and reconstruction.
This is a site specific artwork for the cube gallery composed of poppies from the battle fields in France. On picking the poppy, it very quickly withers so has to be gathered in small batches and taken to the studio.
These, while held within bees wax, become transparent and faded, reminiscent of memories. Each panel is unique, pale and frail.
While waxing the panels I was drawn to how the petals recoiled to the heat as if wounded, the wax behaved like the mud – solidifying around the poppies and freezing them in time.