Throughout the history of art and visual culture, the flower, a delicate surface concealing desire, loss, intimacy or power, never innocent, has often served as a coded language.
The exhibition "Coded Blooms" at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) revisits this symbolic tradition by revealing the hidden intentions behind floral imagery. Bringing together photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and contemporary works by Pat Brassington, Del Kathryn Barton, Jake Preval, and Meng-Yu Yan, the exhibition shows how a motif long perceived as merely decorative can become a terrain charged with psychological and political meanings.
At the heart of the project is Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs of flowers form the conceptual anchor of the exhibition. Stripped of all sentimentality and composed with almost sculptural precision, his flowers appear as disciplined forms, taut under the light. Isolated against dark backgrounds, the petals unfold like the surface of skin, transforming botany into a study of form, sensuality, and control. In Mapplethorpe's work, the flower becomes less an object of beauty than a formal device for exploring the body and desire through the rigor of composition.
From this historical foundation, the exhibition ventures into more unstable and intimate territories. The contemporary artists gathered here treat the flower not as a mere still-life subject, but as a space for psychological projection where memory, sexuality, and vulnerability intersect. Each practice transforms the floral motif into a fluid form, oscillating between gentleness and unease.
In Pat Brassington's images, the flower appears in photographic spaces that are both familiar and unsettling. Fragmented bodies, concealed faces, domestic textures, and floral motifs combine in compositions constructed through collage and digital manipulation. Petals emerge close to the skin, forms repeat and shift from one image to the next, creating an atmosphere filled with quiet tension. Rather than illustrating a specific symbol, Brassington allows the images to act on the viewer like fragments of memory or desire, unstable and ambiguous.
With Jake Preval, the floral still life is transformed into a more radical expression. Inspired by Mapplethorpe's formal precision, the artist takes the classic composition of the bouquet and introduces an unexpected corporeal dimension. In some works, the water in the vases is replaced with urine, and photographic film is developed from this liquid, producing color alterations and distortions on the image's surface. This gesture connects the formal beauty of photography to an intimate, corporeal dimension, recalling the traditions of queer art that use the body to challenge aesthetic and social norms.
Del Kathryn Barton adopts a more immersive and sensory approach. Her works blend collage, painting, and photography in color-saturated compositions where bodies merge with monumental flowers. The petals take on a carnal dimension, evoking fertility, sexuality, and transformation. Human and plant forms merge, creating images of almost dreamlike intensity where nature becomes an extension of the body.
More discreet but just as powerful, Meng-Yu Yan's practice explores the relationships between light, shadow, and identity. Inspired by the aesthetics of shadow described by the Japanese writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, the artist transforms flowers into silhouettes projected onto the body. The petals become luminous, almost abstract outlines that glide across the skin and dissolve the boundary between plant form and human presence. In these images, the flower is no longer an object but a trace, a fragile sign evoking transformation and intimacy.
Through these different approaches, "Coded Blooms" reminds us that the flower is one of the most ambivalent symbols in visual history. Offered during declarations of love, placed on graves, used in the most personal social rituals, it accompanies moments when words fail. In art, it has often served as a substitute for the body or sexuality, allowing for the evocation of intimacy when direct representation was impossible.
The exhibition reveals that the flower is much more than a decorative motif. It acts as a form laden with contradictory meanings: fragile and provocative, sensual and restrained, aesthetic and political. By revisiting this symbolic language through the lens of contemporary photography, "Coded Blooms" reminds us that certain images continue to speak precisely where words fail.
“Coded Blooms: flowers have never been innocent”
Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150
