Flowers have been arriving in the recent work in quantity — poppies, dandelions, dense trailing stems that fill the space around a figure and then start filling the figure too. They are not drawn from a vase on the desk. The patterns come out of historical ornament and out of botanical photography, which is a meaningfully different starting point.
Ornament, not observation
Art Nouveau is one of her two stated influences, alongside Egon Schiele, and it shows most clearly here. Art Nouveau treated the plant form as a structural device: a stem was something to organise a composition around, a whiplash curve was a way of moving an eye across a panel. The flowers were never botany. They were architecture that happened to look organic.
That is how they function in these drawings. A run of stems will follow the line of a spine and extend it past where the body ends. A mass of petals will sit exactly where a composition needs weight. Remove them and the figure does not just lose decoration — it loses its footing on the page.
Why photographs rather than life
Drawing from a photograph flattens a plant into pattern before the pencil touches the paper. The depth is already gone; what is left is silhouette, repetition, the rhythm of one shape against another. For work that lives on contour, that pre-flattening is useful. It is the same reason the figures read as line rather than volume.
What the flowers are for
In the strongest of these images the botanical passage does something the figure cannot do alone. Two people fold into each other and the stems keep going, over and through, until the boundary between one body and the other stops being locatable. The picture is about not being able to tell where you end. The flowers are how that gets said.
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