A face disappears behind a bell-shaped flower. Nearby, two enlarged mouths hover in uneasy proximity, lips pressed so closely together they begin slipping into abstraction. Further into the gallery, shadows fracture a body into geometric fragments while, across another wall, bouquets flare through saturated blues and violets as though colour were beginning to erode the image itself.
From its opening moments, Coded Blooms: flowers have never been innocent at the Museum of Australian Photography makes clear that flowers here will not function as passive symbols of beauty. Curated by Angela Connor, the exhibition approaches the floral image as a visual language through which sexuality, intimacy, mortality, grief and desire circulate indirectly. Bringing together works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Pat Brassington, Del Kathryn Barton, Jake Preval and Meng-Yu Yan, Coded Blooms traces how the flower repeatedly slips beyond botanical description toward something corporeal, sensual and unsettling.
Few subjects have been photographed more persistently than flowers. They appear throughout the history of the medium as objects of beauty, ornament and formal study, yet they have also repeatedly functioned as substitutes for what could not easily be spoken aloud. Victorian mourning rituals transformed flowers into symbols of death and remembrance; modernist photography eroticised petals through sculptural light and close cropping; queer image-making often used floral imagery as an oblique language through which desire could remain visible while partially concealed. Coded Blooms understands this complex visual history with unusual clarity.
I visited the exhibition in early April, shortly before departing Australia for an extended photographic residency and survey across China. I return to it now while writing among landscapes saturated with spring blossoms. That distance has only intensified the exhibition’s aftereffect. Flowers appear everywhere with overwhelming visibility — cultivated in parks, photographed beneath flowering trees and reproduced endlessly across screens — yet after Coded Blooms, it becomes increasingly difficult to encounter them innocently. What lingers is not a single image but a changed way of looking.
Installation as Atmosphere
Installed across a sequence of darkened gallery spaces punctuated by deep blue partition walls and open white walls, the exhibition unfolds through carefully controlled pacing and visual contrast. Lighting isolates individual works while allowing surrounding shadow and negative space to shape the atmosphere between them. Brassington’s photographs occupy quieter transitional spaces where bodily fragmentation and concealment emerge gradually, while elsewhere Mapplethorpe’s flower studies and portraits enter into measured dialogue with Barton’s saturated orchid works and Preval’s contemporary interventions.
The exhibition continually shifts between intimacy and openness. Darkened partitioned spaces slow the viewer before opening into brighter gallery areas where the visual atmosphere becomes quieter and less compressed. Meng-Yu Yan’s shadowed portraits reward prolonged looking through restrained lighting and subtle tonal variation, while Jake Preval’s large-scale projection introduces movement and duration into an exhibition otherwise shaped by still imagery and suspended bodily gestures.
Throughout the galleries, flowers operate less as botanical subjects than as coded bodily forms through which vulnerability, sexuality and emotional tension circulate indirectly.
Pat Brassington and the Psychological Fragment
Pat Brassington’s works establish one of the exhibition’s most unsettling encounters with the flower as a bodily and psychological form. Her photographs do not treat blossoms as still-life subjects or decorative symbols; they draw them into a world of fragmented bodies, interrupted gestures and unresolved intimacy. Faces are obscured, mouths hover in uneasy proximity and hands hold flowers with a tenderness that never feels entirely secure. In Brassington’s images, the floral motif becomes inseparable from bodily vulnerability, appearing less as an object to be admired than as a strange extension of desire, concealment and unease.
Installed across transitional gallery spaces, Brassington’s photographs establish the exhibition’s emotional register almost immediately. The body in her work never fully stabilises. Faces disappear beneath flowers. Mouths approach one another in claustrophobic proximity. Hands clutch blossoms with ambiguous tenderness, while limbs emerge partially from shadow before dissolving again through cropping and darkness.
Brassington’s practice has long occupied a singular position within Australian photography because of the way it uses restraint to produce unease. Her images resist narrative explanation and never fully resolve emotionally or symbolically. Instead, tension accumulates through fragmentation, displacement and withholding. Flowers within these photographs are not decorative motifs or romantic symbols; they become extensions of emotional and physical states.
A bell-shaped flower completely obscures a face. The figure beneath is still visible, yet identity itself appears displaced by bloom. The image functions simultaneously as portrait, still life and bodily interruption. The flower feels protective and invasive at once, concealing the face while drawing attention toward concealment itself. What is human within the image becomes emotionally unreachable.
Another photograph depicting two mouths nearing contact becomes increasingly unsettling the longer one looks. At first the work appears erotic, almost tender. Yet the faces begin dissolving into abstraction through extreme proximity and scale. Lips become sculptural surfaces pressing against one another without emotional resolution. Intimacy shifts subtly toward suffocation, engulfment or disappearance. Nothing fully stabilises psychologically because Brassington refuses the viewer any fixed emotional reading.
What distinguishes Brassington’s work from much contemporary staged photography is its extraordinary tonal restraint. The compositions remain sparse and controlled. Flesh emerges softly from shadow with velvety precision. Objects hover within empty psychological space. Nothing appears excessive or theatrical. Yet this restraint intensifies the instability of the images. Humour flickers beside discomfort. Desire folds into unease. Vulnerability becomes faintly threatening.
The installation enhances this atmosphere beautifully. The generous spacing between works allows each image to retain psychological autonomy while subtle echoes develop across adjoining walls. Moving through Brassington’s section feels less like reading a sequence of photographs than inhabiting a suspended emotional condition in which bodies and flowers continually exchange identities.
By the time one reaches Robert Mapplethorpe, the exhibition has already dismantled the innocence of the floral image.
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Sculptural Flower
The presence of Robert Mapplethorpe within Coded Blooms operates less as historical homage than as a grounding force within the exhibition’s broader exploration of sexuality, beauty and bodily symbolism. Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, his flower photographs establish an important photographic lineage through which many of the exhibition’s contemporary works can be understood.
Mapplethorpe approached flowers as sculptural and erotic forms. His photographs transform botanical subjects into highly disciplined studies of line, contour, texture and light. Yet their significance lies not simply in technical mastery or compositional elegance. Rather, they reveal how photography itself can eroticise form through precision and restraint.
In Poppy (1988), the bloom droops downward against a dark background with extraordinary vulnerability. The curve of the stem cuts elegantly across the frame while the petals glow with tactile softness. The image appears simultaneously fragile and sculptural. Beauty here becomes inseparable from exposure.
The photograph oscillates between still life and body. The flower begins resembling flesh; the stem acquires muscular tension. The photograph ceases functioning merely as botanical representation and instead becomes an image about sensuality, vulnerability and control.
Mapplethorpe approached flowers with the same formal intensity he brought to portraits and studies of the male body. Light and contour become mechanisms through which sensuality is organised photographically. Every detail feels controlled to the edge of perfection, yet beneath this discipline lies unmistakable tension. His flowers appear almost too perfect within the frame, their beauty sharpened toward something faintly unsettling.
Seen after Brassington, Mapplethorpe’s photographs acquire renewed complexity. Brassington fragments the body through interruption and concealment, while Mapplethorpe monumentalises bodily suggestion through formal control. Flowers within both practices function as displaced bodies through which eroticism and vulnerability circulate indirectly.
The exhibition resists reducing Mapplethorpe to the controversies historically surrounding his work. Instead, it foregrounds his extraordinary understanding of photography’s ability to transform surfaces into emotionally resonant forms. His flowers are never simply symbols of beauty; they remain inseparable from desire, tension and the body itself.
Del Kathryn Barton and Ornamental Excess
After the tonal restraint of Brassington and Mapplethorpe, the work of Del Kathryn Barton enters the exhibition with overwhelming visual intensity. Saturated colour, dense ornamentation and hybrid bodily forms erupt across the gallery walls with near-hallucinatory force.
Barton’s orchid images are among the exhibition’s most visually commanding works. The flowers dominate the compositions like theatrical creatures suspended between plant, body and fantasy object. Patterned petals flare outward while dark ribbon-like forms beneath suggest limbs, costume fragments or fetishistic appendages. The distinction between botanical form and anatomy begins collapsing almost immediately.
Where Brassington withholds and Mapplethorpe controls, Barton expands outward toward excess. Her images proliferate with colour, texture and decorative density. Yet beneath this visual richness lies considerable tension. Barton’s flowers are never passive symbols of femininity or natural beauty. They appear excessive, mutating and faintly monstrous, as though decorative beauty itself were beginning to fracture.
This tension has long shaped Barton’s practice. Her works frequently occupy a territory between attraction and transformation, where bodies, flowers and ornamental surfaces drift toward one another without fully separating again. The floral image becomes inseparable from fantasy, performance and bodily exposure.
Within Coded Blooms, Barton’s contribution expands the exhibition beyond traditions of photographic still life into a more fluid image environment shaped by collage, painterly layering and digitally inflected surfaces. Yet despite their theatrical intensity, the works never collapse into spectacle alone. Beneath the saturated colour and ornamental excess remains something vulnerable and corporeal. Bodies within these images appear continually shifting and reforming, suspended somewhere between seduction and unease.
Meng-Yu Yan and the Materiality of Shadow
Meng-Yu Yan introduces one of the exhibition’s quietest yet most affecting visual languages. While other artists within Coded Blooms foreground the flower through bodily fragmentation, symbolism or sculptural precision, Yan shifts attention toward perception itself — toward the relationship between light, shadow and partial visibility.
Working across digital and analogue photography, sculpture, video and installation, Yan uses projected forms, mirrors, glass, water and shadow to alter how images are physically experienced. Within the gallery, these concerns generate photographs that hover between portraiture and apparition, presence and disappearance.
For the series Persephone, Yan foregrounds projected shapes, papercut forms and partial illumination to explore intimacy and bodily presence through shadow. In Star I (2024), sharp geometric shadows fracture the face so that only one eye emerges clearly from darkness. The image recalls noir cinema and experimental portraiture while remaining deeply contemporary in its treatment of visibility and concealment. The shadow does not simply fall across the face; it reshapes the image itself, dividing the body into fragments of light and obscurity.
This atmosphere deepens in Star II (2025), where the projected star extends across a partially illuminated torso. Flesh appears soft yet distant beneath the projection, while the body hovers between exposure and withdrawal. Yan avoids theatricality entirely. Tension accumulates instead through stillness, restraint and incomplete visibility.
What distinguishes Yan’s contribution within Coded Blooms is the way light ceases operating as revelation and instead behaves like interruption. Flowers and shadows no longer function merely as symbolic motifs; they become perceptual conditions through which intimacy is approached indirectly.
Within the exhibition’s broader exploration of coded desire and corporeal imagery, Yan’s photographs offer a quieter but deeply resonant counterpoint to the intensity of Brassington and the sculptural sensuality of Mapplethorpe. Their emotional force emerges precisely through ambiguity. The viewer is never allowed complete certainty. Something always remains withheld.
Jake Preval and the Vulnerability of the Image
Jake Preval’s works complete the exhibition by introducing fragility, material transformation and collective human presence into Coded Blooms. Working across photography, video, performance and sculptural intervention, Preval treats photography not as a fixed image or neutral record, but as something tactile, mutable and continually open to alteration. Through recurring collaborations with friends and lovers, his practice foregrounds intimacy, desire and vulnerability within contemporary queer experience.
His floral photographs initially appear closest to traditional flower photography, yet they quickly destabilise that lineage through chromatic distortion, atmospheric haze and softened surfaces. In Still life with urine (I) and Still life with urine (II) (both 2025), bouquets emerge through luminous floods of saturated blues, violets, greens and burning oranges that drift across the image like liquid atmosphere. Colour partially veils the flowers beneath translucent chromatic fields, as though the photographs themselves were beginning to dissolve.
The effect is simultaneously seductive and uneasy. Flowers no longer appear as stable botanical subjects available for contemplation. Instead, they hover between blooming and deterioration, material presence and disappearance. Petals dissolve into radiant fogs of colour while spatial clarity collapses beneath layered light leaks and atmospheric interference. The photographs feel lush yet fragile at the same time.
Unlike Mapplethorpe’s sculptural precision and formal exactitude, Preval embraces permeability. Colours flare beyond natural description. Edges soften and dissolve. Surfaces bleed gradually into one another. Photography here behaves less like transparent representation than an unstable material surface continually shifting under pressure.
This fragility connects directly to Preval’s broader engagement with queer embodiment. Across his practice, bodies and flowers exist within states of continual transition rather than fixed identity. The bouquets become delicate human forms already entering change and disappearance. Beauty within these works remains inseparable from temporality.
Preval extends these concerns further through Bloom (2024), a large-scale two-channel HD video installation. Five performers move through a slow choreographed sequence while wearing oversized photographic cut-outs of faces, limbs and fragments derived from Preval’s own images of friends and lovers. Filmed simultaneously from front and rear perspectives, the installation unfolds across dual projections that encourage viewers to move physically between viewpoints.
The work operates through duration rather than spectacle. Bodies drift toward one another, separate and reform through gestures of touch and proximity. Accompanied by a dreamlike electronic score, the performers appear less like fixed individuals than shifting collective forms continually assembling and dissolving. At moments the figures resemble living collages; elsewhere they appear strangely floral, opening and folding through movement.
After the psychological compression of Brassington and the ornamental density of Barton, Preval’s works introduce a quieter atmosphere into the exhibition. Yet beneath their softness lies considerable tension. The instability of the photographic image itself becomes inseparable from the fragile conditions through which intimacy is experienced, performed and remembered.
Beauty After Innocence
By the conclusion of Coded Blooms, the floral image has undergone repeated transformation. Flowers become masks, bodily surrogates, ornamental excesses, shadows and fragile material presences. What lingers after leaving the exhibition is not a singular curatorial thesis but a changed condition of looking.
Beauty throughout the galleries remains seductive yet faintly unsettled. Bodies appear exposed yet partially concealed. Flowers hover continually between decoration and disturbance.
None of the artists allow the flower to remain fixed as symbol, decoration or metaphor alone. Through cropping, projection, fragmentation, performance and surface manipulation, the floral image becomes inseparable from the body itself — intimate, excessive, vulnerable and unresolved.
In an era saturated with endlessly consumable images of beauty, Coded Blooms restores complexity to the act of looking. The exhibition leaves viewers with the uneasy recognition that flowers have always carried meanings far less innocent than their beauty first suggests.
Exhibition Details
CODED BLOOMS | flowers have never been innocent
7 March – 24 May 2026
Curated by: Angela Connor, MAPh Senior Curator.
Museum of Australian Photography
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill VIC 3150, Australia
Entry: Free
Opening Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10am–5pm; Saturday–Sunday 10am–4pm; Closed Monday.
More information: maph.org.au
