Ghost Flowers
A series of drawings, prints and photographs that reproduce a flower motif taken from a mass-produced domestic net curtain to interrogate the shifting status of domestic objects.
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-105-1745
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Work presented in various locations including hotels and IPS Gallery, Birmingham School of Art, U.K.
- Open access status
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- Month of production
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- Year of production
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Ghost Flowers (2018–20) is a practice-based research output that utilises durational and process-based techniques to interrogate the shifting status of domestic objects. Ghost Flowers comprises a series of drawings, prints and photographs that reproduce a flower motif taken from a mass-produced domestic net curtain. The ‘copies’ are made by drawing and printing techniques that produce an inverse (ghost) image of the flower. Drawings use pencil to copy through the holes in the net, whilst prints on glass and paper fill the netted gaps with petroleum jelly and are photographed in their temporary state against different surfaces and backgrounds.
Stokes’s written exposé, Ghost Flower 1 (2018), is used as both a method of dissemination and a methodology to critique and reflect on the laborious task of reproduction and the ruminations that the process engenders. A shift in focus gives rise to an attentive looking that produces an intimacy with the object, which is invested with care. Ghost Flowers adopts a humble aesthetic to question hierarchies of taste.
As ruminations on the process shift to the autobiographical, the question of reproduction as translation arises. The subject passes through a particular body and mind and observation becomes encounter where cultural, material and personal significance coalesce. Tavi Meraud articulates this shift in intimacy as ‘possession’ in the double sense of ‘to own’ and to oneself be owned or ‘haunted’ (Meraud, 2017).
When a flower motif is detached from its pattern, it refers to its origins as a singular object with traces of a past existence. The flower motif has been historically put to work to evoke an idealised English countryside. Thus, this post-natural mediated plant is recognised as our ‘queer kin’ (Castro, 2019), promoting empathy and kinship with the object and its physical and ideological journey to market.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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