Budding

A late 19th century European trumeau mirror, its glass now weathered and distorted with age, holds a macro photograph of rose hips from a Roman garden in its upper compartment — replacing what was once a botanical painting with a botanical photograph, one era of image-making quietly succeeding another. The rose hips are the moment after bloom: the flower's visible beauty gone, the seeds of the next cycle already forming within.
The mirror below does what mirrors do, but imperfectly — the reflection blurred and shifted by time, the viewer's image returned to them altered. To stand before Budding is to see yourself through the lens of everything that has already passed, while looking up at what is quietly preparing to begin. Deterioration and renewal occupy the same frame, neither canceling the other out.