Cutting

Cutting (diptych) depicts the artist’s father and mother holding an orchid cactus encased in wax. Also known as Queen of the Night, this plant can take up to a year to produce a flower that only blooms for a single night. Planted by his parents in the home where he was born, it has been nurtured and regrown from cutting to cutting. On rare occasions when it flowered, his grandmother would make a healing soup from its sweet intoxicating blossom. Encasing the plant in wax is a symbolic act – one of holding onto collective cultural memory – but in doing so the plant is destroyed. This work explores the transmission of culture, and the passage between sensory and material thresholds of the body.