Decaying Beauty by Dilge Dilsiz
33″x48″ Collage, each Digital Photographs is 10″x15″
With this body of work, my aim is to create visual presentations of time passing. I photograph the process of flowers decaying, fading away, just like everything else that surrounds us, including oneself.
Dear Dilge,
You will, undoubtedly, receive many compliments regarding the your photographs of decaying flowers. They are gorgeous reminders that beauty can result at all stages of the life cycle. However, your work does not address what happens to the flowers after they are decomposed? In order for this project to support the thesis of Beyond Death, it would be necessary to follow the flowers to the next stage of their materiality, and the next, and perhaps also the next. Can dried petals be used as a growing medium? How long does it take for them to become compost? Do the stems, the leaves, the petals have different ‘beyond death’ futures?
This is a rich area to explore because it addresses a cultural bias about flowers: that their beauty ends when the wither.
Dear Linda, thank you so much for your kind words about my photography. I definitely see how my work lacks to address what happens after decomposition, I thought the flowers would dry and crumble a lot faster than it’s actually taking! I am hoping they will hopefully come to the next stage soon for me to be able to re-photograph them 🙂