Rose Branch

Sometimes it starts with a clear idea.
Other times it's more a feeling you keep circling back to, without quite naming it.

This was somewhere in between.

I had been looking at roses, but not in the usual sense. Not neat garden roses, or anything particularly controlled. The ones that stayed with me were looser. Branches that didn't seem to follow a clear direction. Flowers at different stages, all existing at once — buds, open blooms, petals beginning to turn.

Not wild in the sense of where they grew, but in how they behaved.

That was what I kept noticing.

It wasn't one perfect flower. It was the whole stretch of the branch.
The way it carried everything at once — beginning, middle, and something just past its best.

I didn't want to isolate a single bloom. That felt too still, too resolved.

So I began building it as a sequence rather than a composition. Working across stages at the same time — forming buds, opening some flowers further, letting others soften and fall slightly away. Nothing held in the same moment.

It took a while to find the balance. Too much, and it felt heavy. Too controlled, and it lost that sense of looseness I was trying to keep.

The frame came later, but it settled things.

Not as something to contain the branch, but as a way of holding a section of it — like lifting a small part of something larger and bringing it closer. As if the rest continues beyond what you can see.

I kept thinking of it as a moment you notice briefly, rather than something arranged.

Something caught in passing.

There's a point with roses where they begin to shift — petals thinning, edges turning, the structure loosening slightly. They become softer, less defined.

That felt important to include.

Not just the rose at its fullest, but the sense of it moving beyond that.

So the piece holds all of it at once.

Something forming, something open, and something already beginning to fade.

And for a moment, it holds.

The piece now sits within Available Works.

Rebecca.