I have been working with Hydrangeas for the last 3 years and using objects and flowers that I have a connection to through memories or experiences. 3 years ago it was my last sister to get marrieds wedding and her main theme was hydrangeas and I held hydrangeas most of the day (my bouquet). From then on I have been experimenting with hydrangeas in my work, colourful ones, delicate ones, big ones, small ones, cast ones, electroformed ones... (There is a lot more to experiment with and find out) but there is something/a few things that create this bond between myself and the hydrangea flower. One of the bonds is the significant memories it holds for me but there is more to this flower that I need to capture, I need to find out what about it keeps me designing and making around it.
there are two main aspects of the hydrangea that intrigue me:
1. its fragility-
a) the way the flower looks
b) how it has to be handled and the conditions it grows in
2.looking at the hydrangea flower as a whole, all the little flowers on the bulb all look the same -until you come down closer and look at each flower individually. Each flower has it's own shaped petals, different amounts of petals ranging from 3 to 6, each petal twists or turns in its own direction.
After speaking with Tony, Chirs and marlene, Tony we came to the conclusion that the way in which I view the Hydrangea flower is a metaphor for something and I need to think about what it is.
In working and caring for my hydrangeas I have found that once you pick them if they are picked too early and it is a hot day they whilt and you cannot even tell what they are a few hours later but if you pick them at an older stage of their life span, they dry out very nicely and keep their shape although their petals become more twisted and they can fold back on each other. They are beautiful whilst they are young and the petals are still alive and colourful as well as soft but when you pick them their beauty changes to a different kind of beauty and they become more fragile in their handling.
For the last year of my Btech I have been trying to capture the hydrangea as it is in real life. So I cast some and electroformed others and tried to make the duplicate of a hydrangea in metal but as if it was real. I enjoyed this process and learning this new technique of electro forming but however I still felt like there was an aspect of the hydrangeas delicacy missing. I felt like I needed to capture the real flower as close as i could in metal because the flower in real life is so beautiful and i needed to capture this beauty. I went through my old journal from last year May 2010 and after casting a whole lot of flowers I wrote a thought or question to myself in my journal and it said "is there beauty in a captured moment or is the beauty lost due to trying to capture it; is it not that the essence of beauty is that it can only be experienced in a moment and cannot be reproduced or easily captured."
This links into my work as I have been using memories in my work and trying to capture moments/feelings from moments in my life. I find when I try to capture and save these moment and feelings I loose part of their beauty whilst trying to do so. This makes me aware of the impermanence of time and the fragility within this. After speaking with marlene and chris the word transience came about.
I would also like to use certain pieces of jewellery or little sculptors I create with my hydrangeas to symbolise the past the present and the future of my life with the realisation that beauty of memories and moments is that they dont last forever but this is what makes them beautiful and worthwhile trying to capture them.
