...a history tied with colonialism to a large extent. This historical relationship that has become a theme in my work this year. It is largely away to look at colonialism and the mark that it has left on the world, even in something as almost unnoticeable as the flora and fauna around us. This is a somewhat roundabout way to remind people just how large and effect colonialism has on the world, its not a way to overwrite the major truths about colonialism, the effect this act had on African cultures and people, but rather a way to subtilty bring it back into the dialogue when people might want to forget.

It’s also a look at the material mentality that existed behind, and fuelled colonialism. It’s a look at the strange desire to own on behalf of the colonisers, anything – land, people, flowers, power – that was deemed useful, beautiful, and good and then the destruction enacted by colonisers of anything that was deemed useless, lesser, or just unwanted by them, just so that no one else could own it and because it didn’t fit within their own image of the world.

The fact is when Europe was faced with the unknown (an unknown that they had sought out indecently) they felt the need to impose their own image upon it, like god making man except not because they were not making anything, and they were not god.

And this is an attitude the world is still dealing with the fall out from, it is an attitude printed out in flowers.

They terraformed landscapes to fit what they viewed the world as, importing plants from around the world and stranding them in alien worlds where they were not meant to live, and so these flowers find themselves harming their new homes and new neighbours with little choice to the contrary.

In addition, there is the names and the stories of these flowers that have been affected by Euro-centralism. Most flowers we know of today bear names derived from the men (and occasionally women) who “found/discovered” them, in this way, they exist as natural reminders of colonialism, as many of them are named after white explorers. And these names have come to replace whatever names they may have had before, to the extent that many of those original names are complete forgotten, impossible to find.