The Peony Studies: Origin Story
Origin Story: Catrin O'Hara's Peony Studies Group
Catrin O'Hara's three archival pigment prints are drawn from a six-part study of a single bloom — peonies in bud in a holiday home on the island of Texel. What began as a botanical investigation became a private chronicle of loss when, during that same stay, a phone call announced the death of a family friend. Over months of return visits to the motif, patient rework and iterative looking, the floral studies shifted from observation into an unplanned map of grief.
The sequence resists tidy narrative. Study I, made six months after that Texel holiday, appears to be simply an act of looking; its surface holds quiet, almost unaware attention. Study II, created three months later, offers a brittle calm — acceptance, perhaps, staged as composure. Study III, completed the very next day, detonates in turbulent colour, as if an emotional barrier finally yielded and what had been contained rushed out. The numerical titles — I, II, III — were assigned afterwards when the artist recognised which works bore the true weight of the experience.
Shown together as part of The Code of the Subtle — an international exhibition of The Spiritual in Art Collective, curated by Nellimya Arthouse in Switzerland — these three pieces do not promise progression from pain to peace. Instead they chart the nonlinear, surprising geometry of mourning: grief arriving out of order, serenity masking inner upheaval, the heart sensing what the mind has yet to name. These prints testify to the power of sustained looking — how repetition, attention and time can reveal the shape of feeling that language cannot contain.