DECOMPOSITION COMES BEFORE COMPOSITION
Anyone sitting on a bench contemplating the Lougheed House gardens last fall would have been presented with a curious sight. As the gardeners were preparing for winter and tossing dead plants in the compost, a woman was following behind picking things out of the bin. “Initially, they would say, ‘No, no, that’s the compost,’” Rocio Graham recalls. “But once they learned what I was doing, they would save me some bouquets of dead flowers. Then I would say, ‘OK, what else have you been hiding? Bring it on.’”
Graham, 43, is a photographer who creates elaborate still lifes from dead plants and even the occasional dead squirrel or mouse. She has been perfecting her technique since 2013 when she had her “aha” moment while contemplating the fall landscape through her kitchen window. “I had just finished all my canning, and I was sad because all my plants were going to die,” she recalls. “I wished I could just can the flowers.”
It was an innocent thought that led to an eccentric act, as she filled baking trays with water and cut flowers and then put them in the freezer (and her neighbour’s deep freezer). Later, she arranged and photographed the frozen flowers and liked the results for their esthetic qualities as well as for more personal reasons.
“I didn’t want to be described as a ‘feminine’ artist,” she says. “I wanted to be a bad-ass artist.” Instead, she chose to ignore the dismissive way people used “feminine” and embrace it. “This is who I am. I like to cook. I like to can. I like to garden. I have kids.” That self-acceptance led to her series When
I Think of Home, but her understanding of the concept is not the stuff of greeting cards. “Home is such an unstable territory,” she says. “We live in a city and we have this conception that we are not in the wild. I’m saying there is a lot of wildness within the confines of home.”
In Graham’s case, that includes sexual abuse suffered as a child at the hands of her father. One of her still lifes on display at the Christine Klassen gallery is a response to that trauma and to his death in 2016. It amounts to tending what she calls her “inner garden” and it neatly encapsulates her approach. “My work is infused with personal stories,” she says. “And just as you dig a hole in the garden and find worms and all kinds of random craziness, when you look at the inner garden, you find craziness, too.”
Introducing: Rocio Graham: Feb. 3 to March 17 at Christine Klassen Gallery. Cultural Landscapes: Feb. 1-28 at Lougheed House.