A Flower Blossoms is of our time and reflects some of the elements of historic Memento Mori paintings representing many things to many cultures, life and death or love and loss they can offer a moment of reprieve. The slow sexualised flower forms of Robert Mapplethorpe and Georgia O’Keefe always sit silently behind. This show engages our human longing alongside our emotional responses to the still life of flowers as subject to create fragility, beauty, mortality and sexuality. The works of Matthew Schiavello touch closely on memento mori through the evident decay and wilful destruction of the surfaces. The artist looms from the corrupted surface to hold the vase of flowers in a visual neutrality of expression that belies the core experience of human existence. The beauty of these flowers offered up as sacrifice to time literally biting at the edges of the image. The artist as model makes no eye contact with viewer or with any object. No line of sight proffers a blindness to the world, a wall against our interpretations. The light against dark effects of Danny Tasmakis create a floating cut vertically splaying the page in two as one’s eyes travel back and forth between the light and dark suggesting a soft battle for space between the central flower form and the darkness enveloping them. The petals reflect the light outward towards us and stab into and around the flower forms, a dance of hard and soft. Tran Minh Koa’s almost over-burdened amazingness of the left over things, lone shoes, crystal balls that hold no future, stray vases and dead and dying flowers, spices and petals strewn across the surface. All these things and more fight for our attention. But within this glorious mix of life and death a memory takes hold of a past. The abandoned wedding ring, the glasses laid down with a notebook open, loose change from different countries, flowers that have meanings of life and death. Like a vanitas this selection of images offers clues to a puzzle. A narrative that allows the viewer to imagine the story, is it a home lost, a new love, a hidden past created over a shared drink of tea or the singular drip of coffee. Victoria Bilogan has offered up the simple object and the flower traditionally composed as the domestic form. It becomes something illusive to hold as the glass distorts and reflects as it holds the cut flowers in a gentle grip and sometimes the flowers are stuffed in too full, the juxtaposition of pearls sitting by all reflect a lost and longing sexuality expressed as something hidden behind curtains. Hidden by the anxiety of contact in lockdown. The curtain and vignette framing holds us back but paradoxically asks us to be voyeurs into the intimate worlds behind our curtains of quarantine. These images explore with ideas of the intimate experience of lockdown. The detail a shared experience of fear of contagion, fear of other people, our aloneness and our mortality. These images show a beauty in the loneliness by telling stories of otherness, of domestic and intimate detail. We were allowed to walk for limited time in limited areas. What we saw was the gardens, the flowers and weeds of the streets, and our own homes...our domestic life in detail. These flower linked images show us an abstract concept of the beauty of our moments in a time where the world was too fragile to touch.