October 2016

Paper Mountain Gallery

Anthologia is an exploration of Western cultural engagement with arranged flowers – how flowers were poached from colonised lands, how their beauty was cultivated, how they shaped domestic spaces, and how they were gendered feminine. SJ Finch developed a language of flower meanings, then invited female poets to write floriographic poems using that language. Alina created flower arrangements that are representative of the poems, and display them next to their hand-printed English translations. Anthologia seeks to construct a tactile and feminist language that responds to colonialist histories of flower cultivation with grace, care and an excessive love of beauty.

Images by Paper Mountain