Flowers from the Silvermine

Description

To remember and cherish a moment is a deeply personal action. Losing a memory, forgetting to remember, or forgetting why is an intimidating fear for the human mind. My own most precious memories are marked by the giving or receiving of flowers. When I was young, my father would pick the first spring rose to tuck into my hair. I remember running and consequently falling down the front steps of our home only to have him pick me up, hand me a flower, and say that if I walked slow enough to smell the tulips then I would not fall so often. I know my father?s life was full of those same precious moments but when he died he had no memory of any of them. Memories of roses tangled in curly hair or of bloody knees and tulips live on only in me.
The comparison I draw in this body of work is between the process of deterioration my father's mind went through due to Alzheimer's Disease and that of the decomposition of flowers. My flowers appear to be frozen in a delicate time of deterioration. Petals are pieced back together in a crude illusion of what once was all while clinging to sturdier carved pieces in an attempt to prevent the inevitable.