Blooms

Bob and I met in the City and walked over to the Guildhall Art Gallery, an under-publicised spot that holds some 4,000 works that the City of London began collecting after the Great Fire of 1666, when portraits were commissioned of the judges dealing with property claims from the fire. Around 250 works are shown (with free admission after 3:30 P.M.) on a rotating basis in a gallery space that opened in 1999 (the previous gallery was destroyed in a 1941 air raid). When land for the present gallery was being excavated in 1988, the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre were discovered, and those ruins can now be seen in the gallery basement. Although it's often difficult to get a sense of original structures by looking at such ruins, the Guildhall display is very effectively presented, complete with sound effects, and we lingered in the amphitheatre much longer than we thought we would. Our next stop was for some flowers,

not at a street vendor, florist shop, or Columbia Road Flower Market, but at Bloomberg Space, a small corporate gallery space just up the road from Guildhall. What were so many flowers doing in an art gallery, you ask?

Heather and Ivan Morrison's installation, The Land of Cockaigne, deals with issues of "conspicuous public consumption" by presenting two views of flowers in the gallery space, allowing gallery visitors to first see the flowers from close-up as people in the flower trade might, then in an artistic long-range view, more akin to patchwork quilting than flora:

Coming in from the cold, dark street, the bright room and vibrant colours are quite surprising, which I guess is part of the point of the installation. Unlike most art installations that last a month or two, the flowers were brought into the gallery space with petals tightly closed, and bloomed over the course of the installation's eight days. Unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to stop by tomorrow evening's "finale" when all the flowers would be given away to gallery visitors until the space was once again bare.