‘‘The florist sent the flowers was pleased’’, Megan Brady
(Favour)
MEGAN Brady’s interest in relationality, or the relationship between different entities, is evident even in the intentionally slippery language of the exhibition title: ‘‘The florist sent the flowers was pleased’’. Its slight grammatical imprecision invites reimagining or reworking, though not necessarily with the aim to ‘‘correct’’. While this may be my interpretation, the desire to resist fixed meaning or singular definition allows for a certain fluidity of relations and relationships that is more characteristic of encounters and negotiations with people, spaces or places and other sentient beings.
Brady’s relational installation works embody familial, friendship, and spatial connections and considerations. Each of the five wallbased assemblages comprise an Oregon tongue and groove shelf that, despite its apparent solidity, is designed to support the lightest of objects, including postcards (from photographs taken by Brady), slender plant leaves, seed pods, single stem flowers and handmade friendship bracelets. The latter are variously placed on the shelf, pressed into the groove of the shelf, or hang from the vertical support. It is difficult not to approach or describe these works (titled
Buddy arrangements, 2020) as shrines — to histories, people, plant life — however overused the term may be. They are relational complements rather than interventions that coexist with plants and flowers in a space that is both a gallery (Favour) and a florist (Miss Reid). The friendship bracelets acknowledge friend and owner Jacqui Margetts and plants.