#04 Flag designed by Artist Rosslynd Piggott

In 2017, widely acclaimed artist Rosslynd Piggott was a guest speaker for JWA and Spacecraft Studio’s On Top of the World talk series, designing a flag to sit atop our Rokeby Street Studio. Its floral design is a tribute to a set of three flags created by Piggott and Spacecraft for the RBGV in 2013. The flag has been donated for auction by Rosslynd Piggott and will be signed by the artist. The flag will be presented in a display box with the printed artist statement. 

Please note that part of this flag's history is its time spent flying atop our Rokeby Street Studio in 2017.  

Artist Statement:

Regardfully Yours: Waving to the Next Infinitum.
Three flags mounted on the top of the Herbarium at the Melbourne Botanical Gardens wave hello to the idea of infinity. Three flowers pictured are – Magnolia Soulangiana, Cherry Blossom and Peony, punctured with symbols of a circle, a loveheart and infinity sign, they are printed on silk. The silk thread made by worms and woven into fabric, will unravel in the wind, high in the air away from the earth home of the worms. Magnolias are prehistoric flowers existing before bees, they were pollinated by beetles. They have been found embedded in fossils dating back 95 million years. 
Every early Spring with a vision of their fleshy petals protruding from bare branches we are presented with prehistoric memory in the present. Cherry Blossom (these ones filmed last Spring in Tokyo to a background sound of chaotic street life) are celebrated for their gorgeous and fragile ephemeral beauty, exquisite reminders of fleeting life and the importance of the present moment. The Peony flower like a cloud, with it’s multitudinous petals that continue to unfold and collapse in a glorious shifting drama. They are treasure flowers, collected and cultivated by experts, celebrated and honoured in Art, associated with nobility and with contained grace.
Flowers remind us of our primitive and sexualized self, also giving us pleasure through their scent and through the vision of their bud and bloom, their color and texture and indeed their vunerability. While we propagate them, grow them, celebrate and honor them, they too are part of a larger unknowable continually shifting space. 
These images are part of my collection of flower images, also waving hello to the historic botanical garden here that began with the work and dedication of Ferdinand Von Mueller (1825-1896) – his collections and correspondences housed in the Herbarium. Von Mueller, delightfully, so it seems now, always signed his letters, “ Regardfully Yours”. Perhaps, he learnt such regard from flowers and gardens, understanding the respect, care and patience that is needed to produce growth, strength, endurance, abundance and beauty in cultivated landscape. His was an understanding based in the micro, the seed and also the greater space, encompassing weather and also voyage, travel, migration.
These flags retain their connection to the earth, but are seen in the sky. They wave to the next Infinitum, a possible era beyond State and politics, beyond boundaries, beyond economies, beyond wealth, power or need, even beyond Utopia. The flags wave, in their floral forms, a circle, a pounding loveheart (a call to kindness) an infinity sign, to the sky, to space and the vast unknowness that is the space of all of us.

Rosslynd Piggott
15 October 2013