Overview
2019
India ink on canvas coated with archival varnish
Unique Work
Dimensions: 60cm (H) x 60cm (W) x 5cm (D) / 23.6" (H) x 23.6" (W) x 2" (D)
Note: Actual colours may vary due to photography & computer settings.
Artist Statement
‘Rappaccini’s Garden’ series
A cross between Victorian botanicals and memento mori, this series mirrors the elements of beauty and death found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’. It is a Gothic tale with a Garden of Eden setting and Faustian overtones.
The unearthly beauty of Rappaccini’s garden, its gaudy but deadly flora, and the ill-fated creatures who succumbed to their charms are represented through painting botanical compositions using orchids, bones, antlers, and horns. To showcase the venomous character of the plants, nature’s deadliest creatures-cone snails, ring-tailed octopus, box jellyfish, scorpion fish, blowfish, poison dart frogs, newts, spiders, and vipers- were incorporated.
Viewed from a distance, this collection resembles vintage floral prints, however, on closer inspection one realizes that the leaves are actually piles of bones, horns, and antlers. One will also discover snakes and spiders instead of roots, and find that those gracefully billowing blossoms are in fact, tentacled menaces of the deep.
“The basis of all cosmic horror is the violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.” H.P. Lovecraft
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Artist Profile
Born: 1968
Hometown: Butuan City, Agusan del Norte
Based in: Manila
Flor Baradi is an artist born and based in the Philippines.
She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Santo Tomas in 1991.
Heavily influenced by literature and the natural world, Baradi’s art echoes the wild and remote marshes of Agusan, Mindanao where she grew up in. She specializes in creating highly-detailed flora and fauna illustrations and paintings. Her training as a jewelry designer proved useful in rendering the intricate details of her artworks. Her landscapes, animals, and objects are rendered to each minute detail, each one rife with hidden details, messages, and symbols.
Baradi works with a variety of mediums and is currently experimenting with acrylics on layers of polyester films. She has already participated in more than 30 group shows and had her second solo show in 2012.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Follow your obsessions mercilessly.”
Using nature and literature as fuel for my creative process, I compose imaginary landscapes, mutated beasts and anthropormorphized plants by continuously making sketches and by photocopying, cutting and juxtaposing images.
Inspired by Gothic novels, Lovecraftian characters, Victorian oddities, science fiction, and native folklore, my canvases are visual storybooks reflecting my penchant for the bizarre, the arcane and the macabre.
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