Beauty's Time
Beauty’s Time - Living Installation + Photo/Video Series
Installation, video, and photography series | 2020
Materials: Pink rose petals, white cotton thread, mirror, air currents, video, photography, music (Tchaikovsky)
How does beauty evolve when we stop trying to preserve it?
Beauty’s Time is a multi-part installation and media series exploring the natural poetry of ageing. At its core is a suspended sculpture made of pink rose petals, hand-stitched with white thread and delicately hung in a staged bedroom setting. Positioned within this intimate, romantic space, the work draws on traditional associations of femininity, softness, and longing, only to subvert them through material transformation. As time passes, the petals fade, shrink, and twist into new forms. Their beauty doesn’t disappear - it changes.
Accompanying the installation is a series of photographs and videos documenting the petals’ transformation over time. Beauty’s Time is Dancing is a video work capturing the petals gently moving in the air, set to a romantic waltz by Tchaikovsky. Beauty’s Time is Fading is a twelve-day timelapse of a bunch of flowers fading and blooming, composed of 1,757 images. It plays both forward and in reverse to evoke the cyclical nature of life, death, and renewal. The photographs in Beauty’s Time is Still draw the viewer into a contemplative duality: one image presents the installation mirrored to suggest the split between present and past selves; another inverts dried petals to resemble buds not yet opened, collapsing our perception of ageing and growth.
Like the roses it features, Beauty’s Time is tender, sensual, and fleeting. It prompts viewers to reflect not just on the passage of time, but on how we assign value to beauty, age, and transformation. Through subtle shifts in form, sound, and reflection, the work honours the process of change and reminds us that decay is not the opposite of beauty, it is part of it.
If beauty doesn’t fade, but only changes, what are we so afraid of?
Featured in:
Melbourne Fringe Festival
Museum of Me online exhibition at RMIT Gallery, Australia (2020-2021).
Beauty’s Time Is Dancing
The video captures impact of air currents on the rose petals of the installation Beauty's Time is Hanging. The video was paired with and timed to the theme of romance through romantic ballet music and to create a whinature of the waltz.
Beauty’s Time Is Fading
The video work was filmed over twelve days, with a photograph taken every seven and a half minutes. In total 1,757 images were collected and collated to form this time lapse. The video is played in chronological order and then reversed. This was to suggest the circle of life both in nature and humans. It was intended to mimic the ageing of a person allows them to have children, grandchildren and further generations. In nature this relationship appears through the petals and leaves which fall on the ground becoming the fertiliser for the plant again. The music was also timed to a piece from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, act IV, no. 29. This piece occurs when two lovers die in the ballet to be together in the afterlife, thus it creates for viewers feelings of death, romance and rebirth which tie into the overarching theme of the work.