Kathleen Olive calls the work “flower bombs”, but her brother-in-law artist Keiran Gordon knows them by another name. “He calls them ‘floral nihilism’.”
Gordon started his art career studying sculpture but now creates 3D paintings using unusual materials such as hand sanitiser gel and highlighter ink.
Olive says one day Gordon was painting and drawing on plastic paper with acrylics, “and because he trained as a sculptor, he started scrunching [the paper] up and he realised he could bond them to metal. The paper weighs about 50g but it manages to hold its own against the metal. As he scrunches it – they hold the lines.”
As for this particular flower bomb work, “I wouldn’t sell for all the money in the world. I really love his work. I love the painting and the line and I love the imagination of it.”
The work hangs in the hallway of the home Olive shares with her partner.
“We have a salon in the house and it is part of the salon hang. Visitors respond to the energy of it – it’s not like anything else. You can change the angle and perspective totally and it’s like a different painting. A friend loved it so much that she brought one herself.”
Olive is an avid collector of her brother-in-law’s work. So far she’s bought a work from each series that Gordon has exhibited.
“I also have a cloud that he made in the same way. He did the same technique with a cloud that looks like it’s floating against the wall. You move it to a different place in the house, and it looks different and it’s really joyful. It has an interesting relationship with light – it catches shadows with parts that have been scrunched. It throws shadow and the cloud does too – they make their own shadows on the wall.”
