Persephone’s Tiara

This piece represents plants encountered over visits to Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island for the better part of a year incorporated into a wearable headpiece for Persephone. Mythology would focus on Persephone’s presence or absence driving the seasons and abundance and fallowness, but here fern, salal, sarcococca, and oxalis which form a continuous verdant backdrop at the Reserve are placed alongside showy high-summer lace hydrangea and dahlias, counter to a binary narrative of blooming or barren gardens. Cycles of life and death are alluded to with a memento mori and the fragility of these heavily managed ecosystems becomes visceral for a viewer imagining balancing the tiara on their own head.

Want to experience Persephone’s Tiara for yourself?

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