Strangers in a strange land

This work uses an album of flower silks (which came with Kensitas Cigarettes) and fills in the gaps with hand-embroidered Cacti and Succulents, themselves strangers in the land of flowers, but also as a record of the individuals who travelled to far away places to collect and classify these plants. The work was made as part of an installation at the South London Botanical Institute which collects and re-creates ephemera related to Great-Great-Aunt Nellie the Cactus Collector's life and presents it as a semi-fictional re-imagining of her world. Nellie's life was contained within a relatively small geographical area, in her home in Leicester and seaside holidays in the UK but through her plant cultivation she travelled far and wide. Nellie's life was unlike these other plant explorers, but she would have been aware of these adventurers through journals like those on the table. Nellie was an armchair traveller, but through her plants you can imagine journeys she might have taken in her mind, perhaps escaping her life as a conventional housewife. There is something about the unrepressed desire and symbolism in the images of cacti and succulents which suggest a secret subtext to her collection.