The Materiality of Flowers

The Materiality of Flowers explores the ideas of sacrifice relating to Ancient Greek times. Many Greek myths retell stories of sacrifice (either forced or given willingly). Through my material usage, I explore sacrifice: one that is naturally given versus one that is taken. In my series, I have created two dresses and accompanying adornments that represent the Goddesses Demeter and Artemis. Nature is a consistent theme in mythology that helps explain the seasons, weather, and harmony of living creatures. In this series I use physical objects of nature to create my work, creating an even stronger bond between mythology and nature. The physical process of picking through the weeds and flowers for my dresses made me think of how the world was sacrificing these plants to me, unwillingly. As I worked with the material, not every seed and leaf stayed attached and I likened each petal that dropped to a sacrifice given to the goddesses. In my first dress Demeter , the wheatgrass shifts from a matte finish to a glossy and translucent finish. This shift in coatings represents the sacrifices given to the Goddess and how she interweaves them with her divinity. There is also a sacrifice of physical labor within each dress and adornment that speaks to how tedious and meticulous each stitch was to make. My work explores the idea of sacrifice given to the gods by representing the goddess Demeter and Artemis through garments and by revealing the sacrifices that went into making each piece