BOTANICAL ALBUM QUILT


The Botanical Album Quilt is a large, textile quilt of which the design is based on the traditional ‘album quilt’: quilts featuring elaborate patterns of flowers and petals. Instead of picturing the flowers themselves, this quilt lists the various symbolical meanings of these flowers. These meanings are found in the traditional etiquette of gifting flowers; a way of sending out a wordless message to a loved one by picking flowers that hold a certain meaning.

This work was part of Every Evening, my presentation at the Graduation Show of the Piet Zwart Institute. The Every Evening series derives from an interest in the way we look at and write about nature. The symbolical meanings of natural elements often seem to be predetermined, both in classical as well as modern stories: Every fox is a sly and cunning being, and every winter the land is covered in a thick layer of snow. We seem to have fully learned these symbolical meanings, and have an almost natural way of recognising and understanding them while we read. Yet at the same time, they hardly match the way we experience nature today.