At first you see only the garden: a wall of leaves and blossom, pink hearts hanging on their stems, ferns, small blue flowers, threads of colour flung across everything as if a painter had shaken his brush over the whole of spring.
Then the garden looks back.
There is a face inside it. Not standing among the flowers, not posing in front of them, but grown in, the way a stone is grown into by moss. A branch lies across her cheek and she has not brushed it away. One eye is open and very calm. She is not hiding. She has simply stopped being separate.
We all know that moment, though we rarely talk about it. We stand in a meadow, or under a tree in bloom, and something in us goes quiet with a happiness we cannot explain. It feels less like seeing something new than like remembering something very old. As if we had once been there ourselves: a leaf, a root, a petal, a handful of earth. As if the garden were not a view, but a home we left so long ago that only the body still knows the way back.
"The rapture we feel when we contemplate nature is a memory of the time when we were animals, trees, flowers, earth. More precisely, it is the consciousness of our unity with everything, hidden from us by time."
Leo Tolstoy
The threads of colour are real paint, flung over the living flowers as the last touch before the shutter. From the floral series of 2014–15, this work was exhibited in Paris (2017), Milan (2019) and at the Carrousel du Louvre (2023).
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2015.)
