Gather ye rosebuds

This essay was first published in NGV Triennial 2023, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

We love to receive flowers. We place them in a vase, change the water every couple of days and hope they last forever. Sadly, they never do.

So, why do we value them? Is it the reminder we are cared for? Is it that they elevate the aesthetic appeal of our homes? Or do we simply derive comfort from following a longstanding and unchallenged cultural tradition? Perhaps all these explanations are true. And perhaps there is an additional, intrinsic reason.

Japanese artist Azuma Makoto suggests this may be so.

Encasing flowers within clear acrylic blocks, pausing their life cycle at the peak of their visual splendour, Azuma has had more time than most to consider their significance. His fascination with flowers began while working as a florist and flower market trader and witnessing firsthand the instinctive attraction they hold for many people.¹ He soon began to appreciate the centrality of flowers in human culture.

Emotion has long been influenced by nature; research has revealed that plants elicit transcendent feelings in those who view them.² A 2005 Rutgers University study concluded that observing flowers evokes both immediate feelings of happiness and long-term emotional wellbeing.³ Flowers are therefore an essential component of everyday life, as Azuma explains:

[T]hey’re with us from the moment of birth to weddings, anniversaries, and funerals; people celebrate with flowers in festivals, and also the flower is an eternal motif in fashion and art. They embody beauty, strength, vitality, and the ephemeral. I only see the need for flowers in the world increasing, not going away.⁴

The impermanence of flowers is a contributing factor to our preoccupation with them. This brief life cycle is also the subject of Azuma’s venture into video media. In direct dialogue with his frozen flowers, he projects the time-lapsed maturation of flowers, from bloom to wilt. He celebrates each stage of a flower’s genesis and eventual decay, noting that ‘[e]ach moment is beautiful and precious in a different way’.⁵

Throughout history, flowers have symbolised mortality and the passing of time. In Japan, the sakura (cherry blossom) briefly blooms once a year and embodies the idiom mono no aware, meaning ‘an empathy toward things’ – an awareness of impermanence.⁶ This sentiment is a key component of Zen Buddhism, which has influenced many Japanese art forms, including haiku poetry, Noh theatre and ikebana, the art of flower arranging. While Azuma is not formally trained in ikebana, symbolic parallels can be drawn between the art form and his artworks. Ikebana is by nature temporary: flowers are placed together when they are at their most beautiful, with the knowledge that they will eventually wilt. There are resonances of this in Azuma’s time-lapse videos.⁷ Similarly, the Buddhist painting style known as kusozu depicts the lifeless bodies of beautiful women passing through the stages of death and decay.⁸

Outside Japan, flowers have also featured in literature and art as metaphorical reminders to carpe diem (‘seize the day’). The seventeenth-century English lyric poet Robert Herrick explores this association in the first four lines of his 1648 poem ‘To the virgins, to make much of time’:

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,     
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,     
Tomorrow will be dying.

In the same century, Dutch Vanitas painters such as Adriaen van Utrecht and Rachel Ruysch portrayed wild arrangements with drooping flowers almost at the point of wilting. While these scenes ‘signalled the transient nature of all living things, these bursting bouquets demonstrated art’s ability to freeze time and grant flowers eternal life’.⁹

The urge to conserve and extend life is reflected in Azuma’s acrylic blocks, which are recent artefacts in a tradition of cultivating and preserving organic matter that has existed for thousands of years. Flower preservation techniques, still popular around the world, include hanging, pressing and drying with sand or silica gel.¹⁰ In Japan, the art of flower pressing is called oshibana; it honours the flora growing locally and preserves distinct memories of time and place.¹¹ For hundreds of years, botanists have also collected preserved plants and flowers into herbaria. And recently, new technology has enabled the development of a market in cryogenic flowers, which maintain their apparent vibrancy for years.¹²

In the 1960s, an American academic named Robert Ettinger proposed that human death could be reversed with the help of cryonics.¹³ This practice of freezing and storing the recently deceased – in the hope that future technology and medicine may bring them back to life – continues to be controversial. Every year, however, hopeful individuals sign up and pay a high price to have their bodies preserved, with the goal of ‘buying time’.¹⁴

So, should we resist mortality or accept its inevitability?

The pace of life is increasing: if we do not take pause, we may fail to appreciate what is most important. While that pause is unlikely to be a physical halt to the ageing process, it can be a breath, a moment to ‘smell the roses’. This mindful acknowledgement of life and nature’s transience could offer a cure to existential anxiety. It is the impermanence of a beautiful organic creation that augments its exquisiteness, and the fleeting beauty of a flower is a reminder of this. As Azuma notes, ‘If you don’t understand death, then you can’t think about what you are living for’.¹⁵

The NGV warmly thanks Bagôt Gjergja Foundation, Andrew Penn AO and Kallie Blauhorn, Michael Buxton AM and Janet Buxton, Paul and Samantha Cross, Anthony and Clare Cross, Cameron Oxley and Bronwyn Ross and the Woods5 Foundation for their support.

Proudly supported by Major Partner Chadstone – The Fashion Capital.

SUNITA LEWIS is a Curatorial Project Officer, Asian Art, National Gallery of Victoria.

Notes