Floral Installations Connect Life and Death

Law’s 2018 installation, “Life in Death,” shares the same name as her book.
Credit: rebeccalouiselaw.com

British artist Rebecca Louise Law’s engaging installations immerse visitors in an array of flowers at various stages of life and death. Delicate strings of dried and fresh plants are woven together to create amorphous forms and passageways, encouraging exploration while embracing impermanence and decay.

In “The Journey,” which is now on display at the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville, Florida, Law has strung flowers on thin copper wires to represent the seasons. She begins with light colors and progresses to spring pastels before moving into bright summer tones and the golden shades of fall. Strolling through a tunnel, visitors are invited to contemplate these shifting seasons and how they relate to their own inevitable growth and decline. “I want this installation to be a physical and participatory experience,” Law said in an artist statement on Cummer’s website. “This rhythmic cycle that we are all participants of, fascinates me.”

Law’s Floral Installations Shift & Change Like the Seasons

A backlit installation from “The Beauty of Decay” (2016)

Law’s previous installations have explored a wide variety of subjects, including “The Womb” (2019), “Nature Morte” (2018) and “The Beauty of Decay” (2016). Since 2003, Law, who is passionate about sustainability, has been collecting and reusing flowers from previous works. Her collections grow with each installation, and now number more than 1 million preserved flowers in the U.S., 250,000 in Asia and Australia and 500,000 in Europe.

“The Womb” (2019) takes on a quality both magnetic and ephemeral
Credit: rebeccalouiselaw.com

“A dried flower holds time,” Law noted on her website. “A fresh flower holds a moment, and both are equally special. The beauty of a dried flower is being able to revisit it and observe it as a preserved object of the earth, a perfect form of nature that holds onto its fragility.”

A close-up of the summer strings in “The Journey” (2021)

Law’s flowers are on display in “The Journey” until January 9, 2022. After, they’ll be packed like Christmas lights, and sent to the location of Law’s next installation. And then, like so many things in life and death, they’ll take on another form.