As a child growing up in an Italian family, a regular outing with my mother and grandmother involved visiting the graves of deceased family members at the local cemetery in Melbourne. During these excursions I would encounter huge bouquets of artificial flowers embellishing most of the graves in the Southern European section of the cemetery. I thought it absurd and ironic that the ‘forever’ flowers dared to defy death. More recently, I have spent a lot of time walking my dogs through the Melbourne General Cemetery situated close to my home. This time I noticed the abundance of ‘lost’ artificial flowers blown by the wind long ago, now belonging to nobody.

And so, I started to collect them.

Irvin D. Yalom suggests that we die twice. "Someday soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory”1. There is a beauty in the fragile, patina of these flowers that for me reveals the story of time and possibly exposes the extent to which other’s memories of the deceased have also faded. For me, these flowers denote acts of remembering, life’s transience and the stories that bind us all.

1. Irvin D. Yalom: Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Basic Books, 2012