Deadheading

The beauty of decay

The series Deadheading documents the fragile and transient beauty of decay by recording one phase in the cycle of growth, prime, death and rebirth. What we may perceive as dead, untidy, undesirable and imperfect is, in fact, nature’s magnificence (1). Perfection as we understand it is an entirely artificial (i.e. human-made and therefore un-natural) concept.

Deadheading is the gardener’s caring act of removing dead flowers from a plant before they set seeds to encourage the plant to re-flower. This pleases the viewer’s senses but, much more importantly, creates more nectar for the wildlife, the pollinators. (2)

Many plants (not all) respond to deadheading by re-flowering. Of the plants photographed, the poppy, for instance, or the verbena would not normally require deadheading because their flowers would not re-grow.

In our garden, we stop deadheading some time in September because we want to have beautiful seedheads over the winter months and because we do not want our plants to flower themselves to death.

The series consists of thirteen colour photographs. It was created in July and September to October 2020 in my studio using plants from our own garden. In each case, the photograph was made within minutes of deadheading. The photographs are not, as such, retouched. If there was a spot on a petal, I did not remove it. A speck of soil I kept, and if there was an insect, I left it and later resettled it in the garden.

The series Deadheading comments on the cycle of life, balance, renewal and our duty to do more to look after our planet. 

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(1) We find all these principles also in the concept of wabi-sabi.
(2) If we wiped out the human species, nothing negative of any significance would happen. On the contrary. If we did the same to the insects, most life on earth would end.

Prints

Prints in a limited edition of six are available to buy. The prints are produced in-house by myself. They are numbered and hand-signed and come with a Certificate of Authenticity. For this edition I have chosen Kozo paper from the Japanese paper mill Awagami. Read more about this paper here.

To buy prints, click on an image to enlarge it. On a desktop or laptop hover the pointer over the image to display the description and the buy this limited edition print link. On mobile devices, press the red dot on grey background in the bottom right corner of your screen.

You can also go straight to this collection at Saatchi Art, who handle the sale of my work.