Coded blooms – Flowers have never been innocent

Coded blooms begins with the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose flower photographs form the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, these works establish a charged framework for a contemporary rereading of the floral. In Mapplethorpe’s hands, the bloom becomes sculptural, erotic and exacting, stripped of sentiment and sharpened into form.

From this point, four artists push the floral beyond polite still life traditions into unruly and intimate terrain. Pat Brassington, Del Kathryn Barton, Jake Preval and Meng-Yu Yan each approach the flower as a site of psychological tension, bodily presence and relational meaning. Here, petals, shadows and surfaces operate as signals, carrying what is hidden, forbidden or quietly radical.