Pia Jane Bijkerk

Pia Jane Bijkerk works with real flowers, she creates new spaces with them by using washy tape to affix them to walls, the flowers then slowly die and you are left with the an piece. Pia Jane's work looks at how beautiful flowers can be alive or dead, its almost as if she captures a life time of a flower, I think as people we are so used to discarding things when they die and moving on, for me Pia looks past this and continues to hold onto the beauty of the flower even when its died, this is important as I believe of course there is still beauty in something when it no longer exists. You don't have to be alive to be beautiful, some things hold much more meaning and characteristic detail when they are actually dead, for me it relates to a saying i once heard 'we kill flowers because they are beautiful, we kill ourselves because we are not' for me this piece relates a lot to this quote.

This work is similar to Anne Lory's, although Anne specific piece is a photographic image it still looks at the beauty within a flower or weed when it is dead, just like Micheal Landy and his diary of weeds, he looked at the beauty within weeds, when most of us look at weeds and choose to destroy them and discard of them from our gardens, when really is there a need? Weeds can be just a beautiful as the 5 bulbs of tulips you planted yesterday, if you don't recognise the beauty of either a dead flower or a weed then what is your illusion of beauty?! I believe there is beauty within everything it is up to us as the individuals to recognise it.

For me the washy tape also plays a big part in this piece, its almost like an aid to hold the flower up, its keeping the flower in place almost like a visible support system, without the washy tape the flower wouldn't be able to hold its own, it would fall to the floor and be seen as waste. This may seem rather negative but its also the world we live in, once something temporary hits the floor just like food we dispose of it, in this piece the washy tape is preventing this from happening.