Joe Horner
Joe Horner’s flower block prints distort and show us a different dimension of a commonly portrayed subject. In layering and freezing the flowers in a block of ice we have part of the subject obscured and the remaining elements of the flower are highlighted. This results in a kind of beautiful sense of the abject, a sense of the fleshy nature of the flowers as their fragility and flimsiness is absorbed and obscured in the two dimensionality of the what the ice block reveals.
His floating prints (petals and egg) isolate these items for us and show them in a new context, a context of ‘apparent’ zero gravity and beautifully stop time. In viewing these, the audience gets a sense of ‘what next?’ or ‘what are these really?’ The floating petals reminds me of my own work from 2016, a process of creating visual poems through arrangement of petals on watercolour paper.
