Micro flower series - red 1

I've been feeling very contemporary lately and I have been exploring new medium for me to work with. I have 'invested' in silk screening, I have my frame made up but I don't have any screen filler or squeegee so I have been held back from silk screening until I attain the necessary equipment. Since I cannot make any prints I have begun working with metal, sometime in the future I want to buy a welding machine, along with an air compressor but anyways, I can't weld so I'll have to self teach myself, same with silk screening, but it will be interesting. So I've been playing around with wires and aluminum to create shapes and patterns and I've found these flowers quite interesting, they never take the same shape, they're all different and unique, individual. This micro series I have going is part of my flower collection, the flower collection is my way of representing individuality being independent of shape, size and colour through a structural ironic metaphor of the natural beauty of a flower being re-created by man made synthetics, a flower made of metal, representing various individual identities made by one individual.

Rose with damaged petals - process

This is my first flower I made while working with metal and the first of my flower collection. The metal wire is fairly thick but fairly malleable which allowed manipulation of shape easily formed using just my hands. This is a progress shot so it is still incomplete, the name rose with damaged petals came from my most inspiring mentors, Lesane Parish Crooks, commonly known as Tupac. Not many people know much about him, they see the black rapper side of him, but when he was a teenager he wrote would write poetry, he was a poet before he was a musician. The Rose That Grew From Concrete, is a poem of his, it is this poem that has mostly inspired me to continue on in life. I can go on to talk about Tupac and how be is the rose that grew from concrete but I would be here for days, the point he got to was that anyone can defy the natural law of life and grow into something amazing even if they are being held back by a prisoning environment, but you see, people like to point the finger at it's damaged petals, don't blame the rose for it's damaged petals when it defied the law of nature when it grew from concrete.