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Artist: Gerri York
Artwork Title: Tulips with Spectre
Year Created: 2025
Dimensions: 20.5 × 25.5” Finished
Edition: 1/5
The Botanica series reflects on the historical genre of still life, reimagined through contemporary photographic processes to probe the transience of life and the inevitability of death. Flowers and plants, long-standing cultural motifs of beauty and pleasure, are here shown across their natural arc of bloom and decay — their transformation underscoring life’s brevity and death’s certainty. Created in the darkroom, these works combine photogram techniques (camera-less images) with layered analog, scanned, and lens-based photographs of plant material in fresh, dried, and decomposed states. By recording the material at multiple stages of deterioration, the works expand our sense of time and reveal the impermanence and persistence embodied in organic matter. My process documents not only the demise of plants but also the enduring presence of their forms. Layered compositions sometimes preserve fragments of original beauty, while at other times they capture the fragile, translucent wrinkles of decline. In this way, the series becomes an inquiry into time, memory, and transformation — suggesting that botanical matter, like human experience, is at once ephemeral and continuous. Tulips with Spectre v1 includes ghost like photograms of animal forms created in the photographic darkroom and layered with analogue aspects of the print.
Gerri York December, 2025
Artist: Gerri York
Artwork Title: Tulips with Spectre
Year Created: 2025
Dimensions: 20.5 × 25.5” Finished
Edition: 1/5
The Botanica series reflects on the historical genre of still life, reimagined through contemporary photographic processes to probe the transience of life and the inevitability of death. Flowers and plants, long-standing cultural motifs of beauty and pleasure, are here shown across their natural arc of bloom and decay — their transformation underscoring life’s brevity and death’s certainty. Created in the darkroom, these works combine photogram techniques (camera-less images) with layered analog, scanned, and lens-based photographs of plant material in fresh, dried, and decomposed states. By recording the material at multiple stages of deterioration, the works expand our sense of time and reveal the impermanence and persistence embodied in organic matter. My process documents not only the demise of plants but also the enduring presence of their forms. Layered compositions sometimes preserve fragments of original beauty, while at other times they capture the fragile, translucent wrinkles of decline. In this way, the series becomes an inquiry into time, memory, and transformation — suggesting that botanical matter, like human experience, is at once ephemeral and continuous. Tulips with Spectre v1 includes ghost like photograms of animal forms created in the photographic darkroom and layered with analogue aspects of the print.
Gerri York December, 2025