the evening primroses!
AK Bellinger Gallery, February 2024
the evening primroses! is a show in conversation with the first chapter of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, from which the painting titles are borrowed. I wanted to make effusive paintings to reflect Clarissa Dalloway’s experience of the florist shop where “she would buy the flowers herself”. In the shop she both observes and feels the flowers and the moths. The work also contains her sense of being “outside, looking on” and growing invisible with age, especially as a woman past child-bearing years; of being fundamentally ephemeral, and soon to be “laid out like a mist”.
The paintings gather three motifs – flowers, moths, and moons. The flowers stand in for our recollections, our sensations, our vibrant emotional lives, and our very alive-ness. The moths embody the part of us drawn to beauty and light, the part that races about, spinning in and out of what we find most lovely for the time we exist. The moon suggests waxing and waning over the course of a human life. The moon is a calm and motherly presence. The moon illuminates and conceals, and ushers us quietly through our night.
