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I built “The Land That Remembers,” a reimagining of Cosmè Tura’s The Flight into Egypt as an alternate-history world shaped by thousands of years of time. I preserved the distinctive Renaissance atmosphere and recognizable landscape of the original while introducing subtle traces of a forgotten civilization—ancient structures, reclaimed architecture, and remnants embedded naturally within the environment.
I chose this concept to explore how landscapes can preserve the memory of civilizations long after they disappear. Rather than creating a conventional futuristic scene, I wanted the transformation to feel like an archaeological discovery: familiar at first glance, but increasingly mysterious as the viewer notices details hidden within the landscape.
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Happy curating! 🌸
I went into The Met's open access archive looking for a textile. I found the pattern I wanted on a suit of armour instead.
Greenwich, 1586. George Clifford was Queen's Champion to Elizabeth I, and his garniture is etched and gilded with her cipher, two E's back to back, repeated across every plate from helmet to sabaton without a break. Not a badge on the chest. A repeat running over an entire body, worn by royal licence, three hundred years before any house put its initials on a bag.
So I took it off the steel and put it back on a body.
RUNNING CIPHER is one woven matrix and eight streetwear pieces cut from it, shot on Yorkshire moorland in winter with the sun never higher than eighteen degrees above the horizon. My first matrix was wrong: I kept the cipher at armour scale and it collapsed into generic damask. Enlarging it four times was what made it read as a garment print instead of wallpaper. That failed version is still sitting on the canvas next to the one that worked.
The casting carries the argument. Clifford's only child, Anne, was written out of the inheritance when her father left the northern estates to his brother. She spent thirty-eight years in court, won in 1643, and rebuilt the castles herself. The mark he borrowed from a queen is now worn by the women who took the land back.
Everything is on the canvas: the Met plates that fed the matrix, every rejected generation, the casting tests, the frames that did not make it.
Original work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23939
Armor Garniture of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland. Jacob Halder, royal
workshops at Greenwich, 1586. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.130.6a–y. Open Access.
@floraai #FLORAMuseum
this is such a unique concept!
ÙRHỌ̀TỌ̀ (The Altar Remembers) a 42-second film imagining the first night the Met's Benin altar tableau comes home.
The source is an 18th-century cast-brass ùrhọ̀tọ̀ (ancestral altar tableau) with an iyọ́bà a queen mother and her attendants, made at the Court of Benin, taken in 1897, and held at The Met since (Accession 1991.17.111). In New York it's an artwork behind glass. On an altar in Benin City, it's an ancestor with a job: keeping a queen mother present among her descendants. That gap is the film.
Rather than remixing the object, I built the world around it: a day in the gallery where no one stops, the crossing back over the ocean, and the first candle lit for her in 129 years. The tableau itself is never altered its exact composition, patina, and figures are preserved in every shot. Hands only place it; nothing "restores" it. The film ends on the line it exists for: "Tonight, you are not art. You are ancestor."
Built entirely in FLORA: three Open Access reference images from The Met drive every generation; the canvas shows the full trail references, prompts, the three parts, a custom-designed narrator voice, an ambient sound bed, and the final cut, including the failed takes along the way.
