The four pieces of Rosarium were made for the exhibition A garden at the foot of every tree. It took me longer than initially expected. This was due to questions such as: should I paint details of the garden they relate to as they are, make doubles of what I see in front of me or what I see on a series of photos I took against the constant changes? Attempts to restrict the work in this way felt boring, emphasising the ‘oughts & shoulds’, missing the life, imagination and quality of time that this garden embodies and provides to me.
I decided to combine my favourite details, sensations and vague memories of being with/in this garden with other imagery picking up nature and constant change (medieval alchemical imagery) and so as to take it out of an overly hermetic context with some digital technology.
Alchemical imagery engages, like the process of memory in time, with transformations and shows reality changed by a language of inner experience, which appears structured like dreams juggling with fragments of tangible reality. These ancient imagery is often framed by stylised flowers and leaves, framed solidly yet temporarily as a garden is by the work of fences, rocks and hedges.
The rosarium the alchemists speak of not as one might think literally a rose-garden but a collection of ideas and symbolic pictorialisations of time, and these 4 images could be seen as 4 pages fallen from such a compendium.