Prick is a series of sixty-four 7”x5” contact-printed photograms. Each print contains the image of a single petal plucked one-by-one from a bouquet of hot-pink roses.
Prick is a rumination on love, the pervasiveness of hope, monotony of rose-colored glasses, and general awfulness of dating in your twenties. The nostalgic trope of a lovelorn girl plucking at flower petals, chanting, “He loves me, he loves me not,” like a prayer has always haunted me. I’m a hopeless romantic, a yearner, and a true believer in the merits of a little crush, but even I know that if you spend too long grasping at petals you’ll be caught on the thorns.
Prick is for the girls who pine and the men that keep them waiting. I began this series single and emerged from it deeply in love––perhaps the darkroom gods smiled down on me while I was playing my own game of loves me, loves me not.
After all, eventually you have to put the flower down.
Petal Pusher is an experimental derivative of Prick using digital editing techniques to render photograms of rose petals in the same red hue of the flower itself.