PETAL TO METAL

This series started out as a study of death and dying by photographing flowers that were past the point of "perfection". even past the point when we would discard them. I discovered a unique beauty and that death has a life of it's own. It evolved into Petal to Metal by adding inanimate, rusty objects, mostly machine parts, to flowers that were still full of life. My intention was to show the juxtaposition between live flowers, the beauty they express and our attachment to that beauty, along with the "dead" parts of machines that were once "alive" and performing tasks for us, and our attachment to them as well. What's the difference? Even hardened steel wears down and rusts away. It disintegrates and returns to the earth, as all things do. We create things and imbue them with a sense of indestructibility and yet they too dissolve away into nothingness, just as our beloved, soft and tender flowers do. The lesson, for me, is to lose one’s attachment to permanence, to let go of having to believe in forever. Look around, take it all in, enjoy the moment. Hard steel, rust and of course flowers are all equally beautiful, in their own way. The beauty arises from the awareness that they only exist in the moment and that we should savor it; in the blink of an eye it will be gone. All things are beautiful as an integral aspect of a moment in time, including ourselves. It is all fleeting and all we have is right now.