This series captures strange and grotesque images of plants classified as ‘exotic’ – alien to the local region and potentially invasive. The photographed blooms are isolated and magnified, presenting them as unheimlich and spooky, ambivalent as to whether they are beautiful or ugly.
Flowers are a plant’s sexual organs. Investigating them poses questions regarding Western fetishisation of imagined non-Western sexual attitudes, practices, and genitalia, presenting a wry twist on my experiences growing up in Australia as a non-Western queer man. Titling juxtaposes a sterile taxonomic system with images that imply lush sexuality and exotic unfamiliarity.
I embrace the work of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Imogen Cunningham and painter Georgia O’Keefe, and I acknowledge the symbolic and allegorical use of flowers in both Western and Eastern art traditions.