War flowers
FIRST WORLD WAR SOLDIER’S TOUCHING RITUAL
During the First World War, Canadian soldier George Stephen Cantlie plucked flowers from the fields and gardens of wartorn Europe and sent them home to his baby daughter Celia in Montréal. One hundred years later, his touching ritual has provided the inspiration for an innovative multisensory experience. War Flowers – A Touring Art Exhibition examines human nature in wartime through artistic representations that combine Cantlie’s letters and pressed flowers with original scents, crystal sculptures and portraits of 10 Canadians directly involved in the First World War. “War Flowers is an extraordinary example of art’s power to enrich our understanding and experience of history in unexpected ways, while providing diverse perspectives on Canada’s contribution to the war effort,” said Stephen Quick, Director General of the Canadian War Museum, where the touring exhibit was displayed for three months ending in January 2018. The exhibition — developed by curator Viveka Melki and les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Quebec — is built around Cantlie’s century-old preserved blooms. Melki has reinterpreted these through floriography, a Victorian method of communicating meaning and emotion with flowers. War Flowers consists of 10 stations, each showcasing a type of flower picked by Cantlie along with one or more of his letters. The stations represent individual attributes associated with the exhibition’s themes and reflect Melki’s beliefs about war. Each station also highlights a Canadian who embodied these attributes, and features his or her personal experiences of the First World War. The exhibition is rounded out by specially commissioned optical crystal sculptures by Toronto artist Mark Raynes Roberts and scents developed in Magog, Quebec by perfumer Alexandra Bachand.