Sharon Shum
Serene Presence and a Reductive Beauty
My practice has explored the benign beauty of flower petals of manually harvested flowers from one plant at a time. This physically demanding activity involves devotion, discipline, labour, ritual and notions of time. The process of approaching things through dissection, categorisation and art making are re-thought. To present these works, I sieved flower-petal powder directly onto the floor, creating a ground of radiant colour that is at once both material and immaterial.
Where cycles of birth and death serve as a reminder of the beauty and fragility of our own mortality is a fundamental element of my own work, in which nature has a life cycle not too dissimilar from humans. We work in a repetitive cycle and concentrate on progression and growth, hoping to move forward in society. In this way the natural world attains some anthropomorphic qualities as insects and nature, like us, are involved in a continuous cycle of life in order to help them prosper and grow, just as a plant shows the stages of life it goes through, and the representation of the physical life it holds. As the seed holds the key to the plant’s reproduction, it is an essential part of the plant’s cycle and its life processes. Showing each part of the flower’s individual existence is a way of understanding how, once a part of our world, it can be removed just as easily as it grew, but will always be remembered by the mark that it leaves.
These installations reflect my interest in natural processes and organic materials. Engaging with the elemental environments of my own surrounding and revealing the impossibility of grasping the complexity of life and death, I explore the illusions of permanence in the work by trying to somewhat prolong the elegance, beauty and lively colour of flower petals, and show senselessness in the installations. Altogether expressive and vexing, the petals express the uncertainty of life, and as I try to quantify and control, some intangible beauty is lost. Such is life. I have set out to engage the viewer in an enchanted way of seeing, which allows them to slow down and connect with their surroundings.
