Almost All the Flowers in My Mother’s Garden

Almost All the Flowers in My Mother’s Garden is a 144-page work containing more than 100 pictures of flowers, mainly photographed in the author’s mother’s garden, and intimate memories of mothers by anonymous daughters.

In the book the memories are merged together, and thus do not personify in one specific mother, making even painful memories easier to encounter. The flowers in the pictures symbolize the care, or the lack of it, that forms the basis of our growth.

The background of the work is the artist Hilla Kurki’s realization of the silent gap between herself and her mother. In conversations with other artists of her generation, many recognized something similar about their own relationship with their mothers. In the book the collected memories form a text, that alternates with the flowers, where artist from e.g. Finland, France, Slovenia and Hungary try to remember their mothers.

In the summer of 2018, I noticed I was feeling jealous of my mother’s garden. The attention and the touch she gave it felt excessive, something very alien to me. I started to view the flowers as individuals, beings competing with me for my mother’s attention. This ridiculous reaction got me reflecting on our relationship more closely. At first, I felt enormous guilt about the memories that came to mind. I knew my mom had done the best she could, and still I could mostly recall very painful things. Hilla Kurki (b. 1985) describes her artistic practice as pragmatic exorcism. Kurki follows a long history of female artists who renegotiate the past through self-reflection and re-evaluation of their families’ relationships. Her work deals with the themes of loss, mother-daughter relationships and voluntary childlessness.