MOURNING FLOWERS

Mourning Flowers is an art project that brings awareness to the ripple effects of trauma and fear that communities sustain after acts of violence. It uses the flowers and empty sleeves that once wrapped them left as offerings at spontaneous memorials to bridge the disconnect between violence and the human response to it.

“It’s so powerful; I’ve truly never seen anything that ever took this creative angle for memorialization that feels so “right” for the Wrong the exhibition is commemorating.”

-Jan Ramirez, Executive Vice President of Collections & Chief Curator, National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Mourning Flowers is an expansion of two installations I made at the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning and Labor (Maine MILL) in urgent response to the October 25, 2023 mass shootings in my hometown of Lewiston/Auburn, Maine.

The seeds of this work started on November 13, 2015, when I was sitting with a friend at a café in Paris. After we ordered a glass of wine, terrorists began to shoot into cafés across the city, the Bataclan nightclub, and bombed a stadium killing 130 people and wounding close to 400 more. It was a terrifying experience, especially being on the streets of a city and language foreign to me. Our Airbnb was a block away from Bataclan and we photographed and wrote for days, walking the city and watching the spontaneous memorials grow by the hour. Only a handful of flower bouquets the morning after, but soon they grew by the hundreds and thousands. The city’s collective grief made visible.

Eight years later, when the shootings happened in Lewiston, I was immediately thrown back to that place of fear and trauma. I also knew I had a responsibility to my community to make something in response that I had been unable to make in Paris. 

Since Paris, my last two bodies of work, Are you really my friend? and The Ephemera Project were about community building, friendship, belonging, memory, self reflection and vulnerability. This set my direction, and I got to work. I knew I wanted to make a piece about mass violence that wasn’t about the violence. My first piece was a photograph of 18 flower bouquets left in situ at the site of the Lewiston shooting–an homage to the 18 people killed. The second, I made in collaboration with Miia Zellner for the year-one commemoration of the loss, is an installation made from the now empty flower sleeves that once wrapped all 261 flower bouquets. The forms are elegiac and ghost-like, evoking the devastation of traumatized communities who suffer the sudden loss of friends, family and community members.

The work is guided by the terrible fact that 40,000- 50,000 people die from gun violence every year in the United States. The ripple effect of trauma from one event moves from the inner circle of victim families, friends, and survivors to the community in which they occur, to the state, to the country, and to the world.

I am currently raising funds to expand this work globally by collecting flowers and sleeves from yearly remembrances to create a large traveling exhibition with thousands of flowers and sleeves.

Mourning Flowers is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of Mourning Flowers must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.