wedding flowers

Floral Pilgrimage III // The Dutch Flower Route _ What 👁️ Saw 22.04.19 - 25.04.19

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The Flower Industry

Monday 22nd: Finding the Bluemenstrecke

Left from Folkestone with Liz and Carol, entered via freightlane, pulled over with an emergency stop and boarded train - France - Belge (picnic lunch in Flora!) - Haarlem / start of the Flower Route. Stayed lovely Air B’n’B where other guests mistaking my height for being Dutch owner kept telling me where they had left the keys.

The shut Pilgrim Museum in Leiden displaying it’s Dutch still life charm.

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Tuesday 23rd: Keukenhof

Bluemenstrecke, bright fields behind the hedges; straight lines peeking round. Cut tulips for sale on the side of the road and rows rows of flowers being sprayed. Lunch in Leiden after dining out on feast, swathes of star, bulbs, grape hyacinth at Keukenhof “Mega Garden.” Night in Waaldwick: bedazzled by glasshouses, skies and skips of flowers.

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Wednesday 25th: D I S C O

Visited Flora Holland / Flower Auction and entered the NO tourist zone. Serious forward sloping arena of mainly manly back apparitions, with flower trolleys rotating to pop music. Dif. wheels of $$ fortune spin, while a man holds sample as trolleys move behind, like some kind of whirlitzer, where you realise that you cannot process your surrounds at the pace they move in so let it go, minor whiplash at brush with price / scale.

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Floral Pilgrimage II / Caergybi 18.07.18 - 21.07.18

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Continuing on the floral pilgrimage 2017- 2018 I started a collaboration together with artist and educator Amy Ash, this time contemplating both physical and political changes to the landscape. We were drawn to walking around Holyhead, an island protruding off Wales, in alternative directions retracing the steps of St. Cybi and St. Seriol. One Saint who faced the darkness, the other the light which felt like a dualistic coping metaphor for the political horizon. This follows a period of dark reflection as Amy although married to a Londoner was nevertheless coerced into leaving London due to visa issues and so I walked in her place during Summer 2018, exploring sites of importance as either St.

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On the walk I was both being documented in the landscape and taking photographs of my hands with religious imagery (self awarded pilgrimage stamps) within the landscape for a more embodied viewpoint. This dual documentation also reflects both the simultaneous outward and inner pathways offered by spiritual journeys often symbolised by the spiral. Then using snack bar wrappers, local pamphlets and these images, I sent her a map-place of the Island, something to both peruse and wear / physically enter the space.

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