Still Life: Sculptures & Prints

British artist Rebecca Louise Law is known for her unusual approach to materials: she uses mainly natural elements to construct her compositions. The daughter of a National Trust gardener, Law grew up surrounded by flowers. She created her first natural installation in 2003 using thousands of fresh dahlias from her father’s nursery garden. Law’s use of fresh flowers in her installations allows the work to evolve naturally over the course of each exhibition. In contrast, her sculptures are often encased in Victorian-style vitrines and cloches that appear to preserve the contents – flowers, foliage and sometimes insects – in a moment of time.

This exhibition explores the impact of Dutch flower painting on Law’s practice. On display are a series of photographic prints in which Law pays direct homage to the still life painters of the Dutch Golden Age, recreating works by painters Balthasar Van der Ast, Jan Davidsz. de Heem and Ambrosius Bosschaert. The series, photographed by Tom Hartford, features the notable addition of tiny human figurines, reminding the viewer of the complex relationship between man and nature, and echo the immersive experience of Law’s sculptural installations but from a miniature perspective.

The large-scale sculptural installation created within the main Gallery responds organically to the architectural context of the space. Still Life incorporates dried flowers reworked from Law’s previous site-specific installations which she has created at locations around the world including The Yellow Flower (2014) in Nagasaki, The Grecian Garden (2015) in Athens, Flowers 2015: Outside In (2015) in New York and Garten (2016) in Berlin. Her largest installation to date, The Canopy (2016), is made up of over 150,000 flowers on permanent display in Melbourne. Law’s work has also been exhibited at UK institutions including the Garden Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria & Albert Museum.