Sugar Sunflowers

9 ft. Sugar Sunflowers and a gallery show

Yesterday, I picked up the sugar sunflower from Richmond, Kentucky at the gallery with my friend Drew Curtis. Thankful I didn’t have to rent a van the second time. If it had been one bit taller it wouldn’t have fit under the gallery ceilings. It’s at home with me now in my dining room waiting to be unpackaged. Unsure of what happens for it next. When I was packaging it up with bubble wrap, I did so with my passport shoved in the back pocket of my jeans. The real ID I had expired within a year due to a clerical error on the expiration date, one year opposed to ten. Somehow, I made it to vote yesterday in my usual chaotic fashion and the sugar sculpture made its way home.

The sugar sunflower process started with growing them in the ground, and before that by buying a few packets of seeds from Lowe’s on a whim. I cut them down on October 19th and took them back to Mamaw’s to copy and sculpt. I referenced, at first, the flower in its more lively green stages. Then decided that the later stage communicated what I wanted. One section is left green as a bloom. Dying, but not dead. Here are some images of it installed at the Giles Gallery and images of the sculpting and painting process. Yesterday, I discovered that the fat content in the Oreo dirt stained the gallery floor. Perhaps, permanently ! Who knew! 😳

Sharing here the write up that accompanied the sugar sunflowers:

ALEX NARRAMORE is a Lexington, Kentucky-based artist, writer, and baker, who sculpts botanically accurate sugar flowers. These are copied from flowers she grows in her garden. Alex works with her mom at her Mamaw's in eastern Kentucky. She can always be found between the garden and the studio with her Irish Setter, Mocha, on her heels. 

Heartbreak explores themes of deterioration, emotion, and vanitas. Vanitas symbols in historical still life paintings are reminders of mortality and humanity. I always play with this concept of adding intentional imperfections to the sugar flowers.  By including each mark, fallen petal, and discoloration, the imperfections make the reality by showing the sugar bloom as a representation of a living thing. It lives and it will die. A cookie cutter perfect bloom does not show life. Usually, the flowers that are being referenced are still in a somewhat full stage of bloom and life. I grew these sunflowers in my garden, cut them down, and have observed them through their changes. I have been referencing the stalk and heads as I sculpt. The sunflower pushes this concept of imperfection beyond that of the usual by using flower references that are heading from the late middle to bitter end of their life stage. 

Sunflowers are innately happy, but take on interesting and often grotesque forms as they change. Their petals fall and the centers swell. Parts are taken away that can never be recovered. Broken, pulled apart in many pieces that can't ever be stitched back the same again. Jerked around, they're weeping and exhausted. Falsely hopeful only to be trampled again. The blooms are dragged and scraped. The centers are exposed with no protection to keep their seeds in place. This has been an exploration on how to illustrate the emotion of heartbreak in flower sculpture.