Flower of Renewal

Flower of Renewal is built around a simple image: a flower that has no business blooming where it does. The lotus grows out of murky water, pushing through mud and decay to open something fragile and precise at the surface, and this piece leans fully into that tension. The outline is bold and almost graphic, but the experience is disarmingly beautiful: soft gradients of light curling through carved wooden petals, leaves that at times seem almost naturally green. At the centre of the work sits a pulsing purple heart, a concentrated core of light that feels less like decoration and more like a statement – a small, insistent conviction that beauty not only survives harsh conditions, it is born from them.

From a distance you see a single, familiar flower shape. When you move closer, the form breaks apart into multiple overlapping layers: petal inside petal, cut-out drifting over cut-out. It’s hard to rest your eyes on one place. The shapes could be veins in a leaf, river deltas, root systems, a mandala-like structure. Renewal here is not a clean before-and-after, but a stack of processes happening on top of each other – growth, rot and regeneration all running parallel.

In the dark the work feels less like an artwork and more like something alive. The light does not sit on the surface; it leaks out from cavities inside the flower in saturated pinks, violets and ember-like oranges, as if the petals were lit by their own metabolism. The black outer silhouette holds everything together, but what defines the piece is in the glowing negative spaces. It’s a byproduct of the world’s ongoing work: transforming grime into structure, darkness into colour, and waste into the next chance to begin again. Beauty in nature is not superficial aesthetics – it is essential and inevitable.