‘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