Floribunda: Capturing an entire world through flowers

“In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends,” wrote the Japanese scholar and critic Okakura Kakuzō.

Associate Professor David Sequeira from the Victorian College of the Arts — who has curated the new exhibition Floribunda, exploring the enduring connection between humans and flowers — tends to agree.

“People have this idea that flowers are just about joy, but we have an outrageous relationship with flowers,” says David. “Flowers can also be about mourning, we have flowers on our underwear, we use flowers to make perfume, some people are allergic to flowers. We have such an intimate relationship with flowers, which I don’t think we share with any other life form.”

Currently showing at Bunjil Place Gallery, Floribunda is a major partnership between the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and Bunjil Place, bringing together over 150 works from within one of Australia’s most important collections, and marking one of the largest single loans in the history of the NGV.

David explains that while flowers are the organising principle, the exhibition is really about how artists have perceived and represented flowers over time and across cultures.

“When I was invited by Bunjil Place to curate an exhibition, I was intrigued by the idea of really breaking down the relationship between human beings and flowers. I wanted it to be interdisciplinary, trans-cultural and trans-historical, to address ideas of history, linearity, and colonialism, and to really make the most of the NGV’s collection.”

Rather than flowers in a garden, Floribunda looks more at the symbolism of flowers, focusing on two strands: the genre of still life, and flowers as decorative embellishment.

“The notion of the still life is very important, and there's a whole wall of still life paintings, but there's an equal focus on flowers applied to objects as a decorative motif —  on clothing, ceramics, tiles, and jewellery,” says David.

Spanning painting, ceramics, photography, bark painting, sculpture, installation art, jewellery, textiles, printmaking, drawing and fashion, the exhibition features works by international and Australian artists, creatives and designers, including Azuma Makoto, John Brack, Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington-Smith, Jim Dine, Lorraine Barber, Deanne Gilson, Trevor Nickolls, Akira Isogawa, Carla Zampatti, Paul McCann and Yves Saint Laurent.

While Floribunda strives to capture something universal about the human condition, David’s approach to curating the show is deeply personal.

“I had the privilege of working with over 150 works of art, organising them in space, and really getting to understand the relationship between them,” he says.

“My dad was an English teacher, and my approach to curatorship is very much around the structure of language. Whenever I curate an exhibition, I ask myself, ‘where are the question marks? Where are the exclamation marks? Where the capital letters, the full stops, the commas? Where do I want somebody to take a breath? Where do I want them to be dazzled?’ As a curatorial methodology, that's very valuable to me.”

The influence of David’s mother is also felt — “It’s not lost on me that I’m curating a show about flowers and my mum’s name is Rose,” he says.

“Human experience is inherently subjective. That’s one thing curating this show has taught me — it’s shifted my understanding of the lily of the valley that my mum told me was in her bridal bouquet, or the rhododendrons she used to talk about that she would see from the train as a kid when she went to boarding school in India.”

David says this evocative and transient way flowers are perceived by people is at the heart of Floribunda.

“Sure, the show is full of flowers and it's beautiful, but it's actually about people — about their interaction with flowers, and about people learning something of themselves through the work of artists.

“The obvious question that comes up is: ‘why flowers in 2025 when the world's looking the way it does?’ The thing I love about flowers is that if you blink, you miss it. There’s an ephemerality about flowers — they don't care what's going on in the world, they're just blooming. And for me, that’s a real call to be present.

“But my interest isn't just in the flowers themselves — it's about how artists see flowers, and that's what this show’s about. There are spaces of melancholy in this show, spaces of surprise, spaces of wonder, spaces of sadness. Some of these works were made during the Second World War, some were made during the Great Depression. These are not necessarily joyous works.

“Artists have such a significant function — if you want to understand how the world works or doesn't work, you turn to artists. With Floribunda, I want people to step into the world of artists and look more deeply at the way they capture an entire world through flowers.”

Floribunda is on at Bunjil Place Gallery until 20 July 2025. Find out more.