Carnations is a very personal piece. I designed the image based on some flowers taken from my father's funeral floral arrangement. My mum had taken some of the flowers and put them in this ornamental bowl. The flowers were a chaos of different colours and tones, and I wanted to make a print that was about the human tendency/compulsion to apply reason to the unexplained. Why do the petals of a carnation flower always fold in this order? And at what point does human life cease to exist? This print was very much a process of trying to make sense of the chaos of nature, by making sinuous shapes solid and imposing my own sense of order and structure to an image that was in reality made up of many undefined colours and tones. Making the print was a metaphor for accepting or applying my own personal logic to an event that was hard to comprehend - and hopefully drawing some kind of beauty out of it.
Carnations was selected by Emma Stibbon RA for the 2021 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.