About

This event explores, animates and ruptures the once-symbiotic relationship between humans, roses and the natural world. It comprises a collaboration between a conceptual shoemaker (Jo Cope), performance artist (Hollie Miller), sustainable flower designer (Shane Connolly) and curator (Amy de la Haye). Together, they amplify the politicised and ‘darker’ themes raised by the Garden Museum’s current exhibition ‘Wild & Cultivated: Fashioning the Rose’. These include female-flower metaphors, sweated labour within the artificial roses industry and the detrimental environmental impact of the cut roses we buy today.

Jo Cope’s handcrafted ‘Feminist Rose’ (vegetable tan leather, lamb Nappa and beechwood, 2021) is the central installation. This is partly inspired by the French philosopher George Bataille’s declaration that roses are repugnant and paradoxical; when the petals are stripped away all that is left is a ‘sordid tuft’ (1929). Shane Connolly and Amy de la Haye create an installation and various narratives that orbit around this.

On Monday 9 May, Hollie Miller performs a ‘human-plant hybrid’ provocation involving figurative poses that blur the boundaries between people, objects and their environments and provide a politicised commentary on female fertility, sexuality and female/flower analogies. At drop-in performances over the course of the day, she contorts her body to resemble flower forms, animating and camouflaging with the installation created by Jo Cope, Shane Connolly and Amy de la Haye.

You can view the short version of the performance of ‘Not All Roses Are Romantic’ below.