In this project I am working with the decay of flowers and other natural products (tea’s, charcoal, dried herbs) ground with a mortar and pestle and combined with linseed, beeswax, oil paints and resin to illustrate the natural earthy beauty that resolves from the combination of these  owerful yet soft products. My collection includes pieces from beneath the earth which reach delicately skyward.

Both Salt and Honey are timeless methods of preservation, making the title of my collection easy to choose. There is a natural correlation between the flowers, honey, the bees, the cycle of creation and death, consumption, nectar and salt. I am drawn towards creating work that is darkly feminine, a strange beauty both ethereal and deeply rooted in the seasonal essence of life and death. Human life, much like the lives of the flowers in my work, is cyclical and repetitive. When we die we are returned to the earth (just as a seed that blows in the wind is) so that we may decay, flowers then grow where the body lay, bees find sustenance in the flowers, much like we find sustenance in their honey. If that which dies is eaten, then from death we are creating life.

The metaphor of human life as plant life is therefore an attempt to deny the finality of death. Encasing the flowers inside resin, similar in texture to amber (fossilized tree resin, often found with ancient animals, flowers and fruits preserved within), is my attempt to preserve the process, to acknowledge the cycle of nourishment and rejuvenation as being infinite. If that which dies is immortalized – encased in artwork – is something we feed our souls with, then from death emerges something far greater and more powerful. Salt and Honey is my attempt to make physical the denial of death itself.

Caitlin Jackson is a young female Canadian artist working with oils, resin and flowers to create abstract expressionist pieces.