Cut Flowers, Jaime Jenkins, Caroline McQuarrie, Ann Shelton, Ruby Wilkinson and Erica van Zon

Cut Flowers, Jaime Jenkins, Caroline McQuarrie,
Ann Shelton, Ruby Wilkinson and Erica van Zon
20 February – 15 March 2025

          The group exhibition Cut Flowers showcases new works by artists Jaime Jenkins, Caroline McQuarrie, Ann Shelton, Ruby Wilkinson, and Erica van Zon. United by their explorations of nature’s shifting meanings, these artists examine how human intervention, historical narratives, and material processes reshape and reimagine the natural world. Their works reflect an ongoing effort to reconsider the status and significance of plants within our environment and culture.

          Caroline McQuarrie’s intimate textile work offers a reflective meditation on the colonial legacy of “improvement.” Stemming from a personal connection to her family’s West Coast property—where a regenerating native bush, marked by historical logging, stands as a testament to past interventions—McQuarrie transforms the unruly complexity of the forest into a simplified grid pattern through meticulous cross-stitch. This process of reduction, which tames wildness into an orderly, comprehensible array, serves as a potent metaphor for colonial efforts to control and “improve” nature. By stripping away the inherent complexity of a living ecosystem and distilling it into a pattern, her work interrogates the losses inherent in such simplifications. Moreover, it evokes historical practices in which needlework became a means of cultural refinement—a realm in which marginalised women could assert their skill and gain societal respectability. In McQuarrie’s hands, the act of stitching is both an homage to and a critique of the forces that have subdued nature’s wild vibrancy.

          For more than a decade, Ann Shelton has explored the micro, marginal, bleak, and traumatic counter-histories of plants through her photographic and performance-based art. Shelton’s floor-standing photographic installation, from her ongoing series i am an old phenomenon, delves into the lost language of plant lore—a reassemblage of fragments from an ancient belief system that revered the medicinal, magical, and spiritual properties of flora. In many ancient cultures, plant knowledge was a vital, often gendered tradition maintained by wise women, ‘witches’, and wortcunners. The works in this wider series powerfully evoke the persecution these custodians of natural wisdom endured as their holistic understanding of plant life was displaced by the rise of Christianity and the onslaught of capitalist practices. In this glimpse of the wider set, the carefully crafted Elder plant sculpture sits back to back with a submerged and fermenting ginger plant. Her work urges a return to the deep, transformative resonance of nature—a call to reconnect with a legacy of healing, inspiration, and spiritual richness that has long been suppressed.

          Ruby Wilkinson’s Parade, a six-metre-long hanging painting, is her most ambitious artwork to date. Intertwined with memories, emotions, and moments—both grand and intimate—of reflection and connection, it captures sunsets, landscapes, childhood, and relationships with those who helped bring the work to fruition. The marks, forms and colours in the painting are a reflection of spending time in the far north. These moments are reflected in the transitory and sensory character of Parade. The immense scale of this work threatens to overwhelm the gallery space and other works, yet the lightness of touch, fluidity of brushwork, and floaty fabric create a harmonious synergy, making the viewer acutely present.

          Jaime Jenkins is another artist deeply inspired by her connection with nature. The earthy and celestial glazes she employs—evoking starry blues, forest-floor greens, and deep, grounding reds—reflect her profound attachment to the natural environment. Through her innovative stoneware, Jenkins transforms raw clay into forms that capture the transformative essence of nature, continually challenging and expanding the possibilities of her medium. Rambler, Jenkins’ largest work to date, is an intricate and complex ceramic chain structure, fired entirely in two pieces. It suggests a cascading waterfall or fallen dappled leaves in the autumn sunset, further cementing her exploration of organic forms.

          Erica van Zon’s latest series of embroideries plays on the conventional commodification of natural beauty. Continuing her practice of everyday observations, van Zon translates a blur of flowers, plants, buckets, and plastic into abstract textile works. Here, the ephemeral nature of her subjects is meticulously preserved in thread and fabric. Using the ever-changing floral compositions created by supermarket workers as inspiration, she mines quick phone snapshots taken during her weekly shop and reassembles them into vibrant patchworks of colour. Her work exposes how nature is often reduced to an aesthetic commodity, valued purely for its visual allure rather than its original, multifaceted purpose.

          Together, these artists explore nature as a dynamic, ever-shifting subject—continually reinterpreted and reshaped by human intervention and historical forces. Their work creates a dialogue between the organic and the constructed, the emotive and the concrete, merging past legacies with contemporary practices to offer fresh perspectives on our relationships with the natural environment.