It was a glint of light
that caught my eye that day, something on the ground reflecting the sun.
On the grave was a globe,
similar to an upturned goldfish globe, covering an arrangement of flowers
sculpted in ceramic. A petrified world
encapsulated under glass.
There were more, many
undamaged, some broken with the ceramic blooms overtaken by their living
counterparts. I had wandered in this
place often, yet never once noticed these memorials, now the flash of light had
attuned my vision to their existence.
I have not seen these
frozen floral tributes anywhere else.
Like rare fossils, these are perhaps the only surviving trace of a wider
phenomena, the production of petrified bouquets as everlasting tributes. Seen through the glass they are the floral
equivalent of a taxidermy specimen.
What was once
a memorial – a memory – that had to be endlessly renewed, each placing of
flowers reinvigorating the contract with the deceased, that by this action
memory is kept fresh and forgetting deferred – is in these ceramic blooms a
memory frozen at the act of placing fresh flowers.
Un-decaying and everlasting,
the brittle hardness replacing the organic inevitability of decay, these simple
blooms stand at contrast to their context.
The memorials proper signal their status as constructs, they are signs
and text, each element making reference to a nexus of beliefs. There is no attempt at mimetic reproduction,
the angel is not seen as truly there
for all the attention to the biological detail of its wings. The ceramic flowers seem to be something
else, though there are numerous other representations of flora throughout the
cemetery, stone vines climbing up broken pillars, bunches of flowers clutched
by marble Madonnas. It is both the
quotidian nature of what is represented, the wreath of foliage, and the way it
is presented. The glass globe is there to
protect, to place apart from the change that is inevitable.
