{"title":"Open edition","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"haley-immac-stockings-lulworth-house-camden-1985","title":"Haley, Immac Stockings, Lulworth House, Camden, 1985","description":"\u003cp\u003eUltra rare item - I made about 30 of them to give away at Smiler book signing at Donlon books in 2015, this from my personal archive. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55672608653686,"sku":"","price":1000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Smiler-Haley-Sorika-Signed-Poster-001cv_c2fb0256-4295-4caf-a0f5-a755540293a2.jpg?v=1747920823"},{"product_id":"window-poster","title":"Window Poster","description":"\u003cp\u003eLucky Dip\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePay yer money and take yer chance... \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56351729713526,"sku":null,"price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Window-Poster-Gareth-McConnell-003.jpg?v=1758902926"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxv-2024","title":"Dream Blossom XXXV, 2024","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower workplace. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The kaleidoscopic colours and lighting in the photographs evoke both the hues and strobes of rave culture with its PLUR values (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), and stained glass windows in an ancient church' \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy Davies, New photography of the Flower, Hoxton Mini Press, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburbs X, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'... bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSean O'Hagan, The Observer, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56889597067638,"sku":null,"price":75.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXXV-2024-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-10x8-001.jpg?v=1765810183"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xii-2022","title":"Dream Meadow XII, 2022","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower workplace. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The kaleidoscopic colours and lighting in the photographs evoke both the hues and strobes of rave culture with its PLUR values (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), and stained glass windows in an ancient church' \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy Davies, New photography of the Flower, Hoxton Mini Press, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburbs X, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'... bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSean O'Hagan, The Observer, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56889775194486,"sku":null,"price":100.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/032-Dream-Meadow-XXXII-2022.jpg?v=1765811059"},{"product_id":"pyramid-blossom-2025","title":"Pyramid Blossom, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower workplace. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The kaleidoscopic colours and lighting in the photographs evoke both the hues and strobes of rave culture with its PLUR values (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), and stained glass windows in an ancient church' \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy Davies, New photography of the Flower, Hoxton Mini Press, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburbs X, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'... bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSean O'Hagan, The Observer, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56889818939766,"sku":null,"price":75.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/The-Krossing-Gareth-McConnell-Sports-Banger-K2-Plant-Hire-Ltd-2025-004-1124x1400.jpg?v=1765811515"},{"product_id":"night-flower-christian-diors-rose-gareden-chateau-de-la-colle-noire-france","title":"Night Flower, (Christian Dior's rose garden), Château de La Colle Noire, France, 2018","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower workplace. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The kaleidoscopic colours and lighting in the photographs evoke both the hues and strobes of rave culture with its PLUR values (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), and stained glass windows in an ancient church' \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy Davies, New photography of the Flower, Hoxton Mini Press, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburbs X, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'... bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSean O'Hagan, The Observer, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56890064109942,"sku":null,"price":75.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Flower-_Christian-Dior_s_-Chateau-de-La-Colle-Noire_-Gareth-McConnell-2018.jpg?v=1765813528"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxiii-2024","title":"Dream Blossom XXXIII, 2024","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e3 available \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The kaleidoscopic colours and lighting in the photographs evoke both the hues and strobes of rave culture with its PLUR values (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), and stained glass windows in an ancient church' \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLucy Davies, New photography of the Flower, Hoxton Mini Press, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlso available in an edition of 6, sized 19.5 x 24 inch \/ \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e49.5 x 61 cm. Please email studio.sorika@gmail.com for more details. \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57410135785846,"sku":null,"price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/DreamBlossomXXXIII2024GarethMcConnellOpenEdition001_a3f87255-e1e9-445d-bf65-21d837f8558c.jpg?v=1772708413"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxvii-2025","title":"Dream Blossom XXXVII, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003e______________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI come back to the blossom year after year. They just do something to me, they are so perfect and transient and yes, poignant  - I was reminded the other day about a few lines in an interview I did with \u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e regarding a publication I made in 2024 called \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-stop\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Stop\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e where along side a specially commissioned text by Iphgenia Baal I juxtaposed blossom works with redacted portraits of young people protesting at the Stop the War in Iraq march in 2003. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“When I first looked at [the photographs], those kids were in their full bloom, it’s such a transient moment. All the flowers pictured in the book are cherry blossoms, which is a well-noted embodiment of mortality, it symbolises both life and death, beauty and violence. So I suppose it was just a kind of mirroring of that life cycle, that hopefully we all have the chance to bloom and to wilt and to fall from the branch and go back into the eternal cycle. But to be able to fulfil that cycle is a great privilege..”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese newly available framed works are priced low not because I think they are without value, they are priced low as I would like them to be reasonably accessible so that they may get out into the world and on some walls. Get one of these up there as a reminder that despite it all the world is full of wonder and that if you have money to spend on a piece of printed paper in some metal and glass you are one of the lucky ones, and that even with that luck that this is over quick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eAlthough this item is an open edition it may only be available for a short time. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57608999731574,"sku":null,"price":350.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXXVII-2026-Gareth-McConnell-001.jpg?v=1775227026"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxvii-2025-copy","title":"Dream Blossom XXXVII, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003e______________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI come back to the blossom year after year. They just do something to me, they are so perfect and transient and yes, poignant  - I was reminded the other day about a few lines in an interview I did with \u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e regarding a publication I made in 2024 called \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-stop\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Stop\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e where along side a specially commissioned text by Iphgenia Baal I juxtaposed blossom works with redacted portraits of young people protesting at the Stop the War in Iraq march in 2003. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“When I first looked at [the photographs], those kids were in their full bloom, it’s such a transient moment. All the flowers pictured in the book are cherry blossoms, which is a well-noted embodiment of mortality, it symbolises both life and death, beauty and violence. So I suppose it was just a kind of mirroring of that life cycle, that hopefully we all have the chance to bloom and to wilt and to fall from the branch and go back into the eternal cycle. But to be able to fulfil that cycle is a great privilege..”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese newly available framed works are priced low not because I think they are without value, they are priced low as I would like them to be reasonably accessible so that they may get out into the world and on some walls. Get one of these up there as a reminder that despite it all the world is full of wonder and that if you have money to spend on a piece of printed paper in some metal and glass you are one of the lucky ones, and that even with that luck that this is over quick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eAlthough this item is an open edition it may only be available for a short time. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57609108128118,"sku":null,"price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXXVII-2026-Gareth-McConnell-002_9d73aeb9-d047-44af-a785-22815030c627.jpg?v=1775229827"},{"product_id":"belfast-displaced-families-fundraiser","title":"Dream Blossom | Belfast Displaced Families Fundraiser","description":"\u003cp\u003e___________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll funds to support people who have been attacked, displaced and traumatised in racist attacks in Belfast.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e___________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Meaning of Flowers\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI was more focused on making political work, whether it be about drug addiction or the situation in Northern Ireland. To take something like flowers and really try and make the subject matter your own is difficult. \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell, Frieze Week, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMeaning of flowers:\u003cbr\u003eHibiscus. Rare and delicate beauty\u003cbr\u003eViolet (purple). First love\u003cbr\u003eFoxglove. Insecurity\u003cbr\u003eFern. Magic, enchantment\u003cbr\u003ePoppy. Imagination, oblivion, eternal sleep\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDepictions of flowers in McConnell’s works:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt could be said that, commencing with dead or plastic flowers, McConnell has worked through many hierarchies of floral representation . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA poignant, beautiful photograph . . . an ominous, soiled, light switch in an undertaker’s, Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland (NOTE), some kitsch flowers embossed on the wallpaper behind it. A poignant, beautiful photograph . . . a sad and soiled mattress with a machine-stitched flower pattern decoration. A poignant, beautiful photograph . . . a vintage tin of butobarbitone (a lighthearted barbiturate derivative) in front of which are some flower petals, the flowers made from what is probably a cheap, oil based plastic (moulded, extruded, or pressed). The light in the butobarbitone photograph has fallen on the tin and flowers with an improbably patient, calm, gradation of tone. A less poignant, but similarly beautiful photograph . . . poor Mickey Waldorf’s flat – Mickey and some desiccated, real flowers. RIP Mickey and his desiccated flowers, gone into finality – the absolute.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoppy. Imagination, oblivion, eternal sleep (£10 bag)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell’s lost childhood friends: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStuart – murdered\u003cbr\u003eGeorge – suicide\u003cbr\u003ePatrick – suicide\u003cbr\u003eJim – alcoholic death\u003cbr\u003eJohn – alcoholic death\u003cbr\u003eJames – killed by police\u003cbr\u003eGlen – murdered \u003cbr\u003eWinky – alcoholic death\u003cbr\u003eStephen – suicide\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlowers and flower colours. God’s colours. Honour thy mother and father . . . take pleasure in the deep petal beauty of the rose – the roseate, alcohol dependent noses of the fathers. Or flowers as identifier codes of sectarian loyalties. Make a nice flower arrangement for your home: white lily (republican), orange lily (loyalist), shamrock (Ireland), and opium poppy (addicts). Or haemorrhage colours – the pretty flower colours of disease. Or fine Liberty print shirts with dried blood and crusted mucous on them – also good for the home. Note: the movement of blood from the vein up into a syringe during injection is what addicts call ‘drawback’ – the blood creates shapes within the drug liquid in the syringe that are known as ‘flowers.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe syringe as a giant illuminated lava lamp in a warm, dark room – the flower rises, and the flower falls\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNatural form, contours, leafage. Flowers on trees. Blossom. McConnell’s night flowers – fabulous and magnificent. (Urban flowers as an epitome of the mood of the nocturnal city – see City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson, 1874). Trees and their flowers revealed by the police under the light of their police torches, police car headlights, and police helicopter searchlights. Wake up 4.00 am, aggressively noisy helicopter in the area, don’t feel good, can’t find light switch, need a piss, don’t want to wake sleeping partner, use phone screen light only, not the torch function, see illumination of McConnell’s framed night flowers print and its shadow – a mood altering choreography, across the wall and up to the ceiling.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePsychedelic: Psyche was a very attractive goddess in Greek mythology – started off as a mortal, well known to be wild, ended up in rehab, shagged a not so nice man, aristo, also a newcomer, both got thrown out, got tattoos of each other’s name on their arms, split up, got back together again. Psyche got clean in the end . . . became a goddess, takes a meeting in Shepherd’s Bush.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlower tattoos, total prison muscularity, Jean Genet, spunk everywhere\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDutch still life flower paintings. Paint flowers for money. Van Gogh. Poverty. Romance, suicide, blood . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell’s photograph of his partner Crista, breastfeeding their tiny new born child, Sorcha, in a hospital bed. Crista in a stately exhaustion, her eyes shut. A very large, very symmetrical, flower tattoo on her shoulder.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell’s The Dream Meadow . . . forms of prayer, church flowers, the church of flowers, the flowering church, the flower of youth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell’s Frieze Week flowers – ecstasies of trippy-beauty – effervescence and fluorescence. Post-contagion-hedonism-colours. McConnell’s Frieze posters\/down in the dark in the tube\/intense sugar colours, growing out of the fertile, warm dust of London’s tube platforms. McConnell’s specialist horticultural knowledge makes his flowers retinally absolute – pure, Class A, medicinal grade. Flash. Flash. Flash. Separation and disjunction. The retina’s relationship of service to the brain becomes a little less servile – render unto brain seizure that which is brain seizure’s . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower convenience store. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePleasure. Total. The floral. McConnell your florist \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell photographs his daughter Sorcha holding up his newly made flower prints, just off the printer. Large prints, super intense, rich colours. Sorcha’s face cropped off by the top of the prints. Only her hands and feet are visible. She wears protective gloves, to keep the super-desirable art object print pristine. McConnell photographs his daughter doing this over, and over, again – a long series. Hello Sorcha! Bless all the children\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePsychedelia. Flower power. Power sharing. Kaleidoscopic. LSD-ish packet of dangerously over coloured sweets, one ridiculously labelled as rose flavour, pig gelatine, from the corner shop. David Attenborough – impeccable, natural world time lapse photography, flower growth. Time lapse of Attenborough getting older and the planet getting worse – a suspicion it must be Attenborough’s fault, somehow. Millions of years of old National Geographic magazines and their macro flower photography, their colossal weight creating a new sedimentary rock layer. Amateur photography: ten hundred billion trillion photographs of flowers in parks and gardens, including McConnell’s grandparents, when he was growing up. Kodachrome.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParamilitaries: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParamilitaries are a kind of Northern Irish indigenous shaman, with magico-religious belief systems and powerful automatic weaponry. Paramilitaries practice as intermediaries between the human and the spirit worlds. They radically expand consciousness by issuing punishment shootings and beatings for anti-social behaviour, including for children and teenagers, and by administering powerful drugs to their communities, including the Class A ‘flower power’ drugs LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and MDMA. In a profound paradox of spiritual learning, devotees may simultaneously buy drugs, and be shot for taking them. Thus do the paramilitaries serve their communities; by dispensing drugs and spells, communicating with spirits, shooting adults and children, and escorting the dead to the afterlife.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlower:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ea) The seed-bearing part of a plant, consisting of reproductive organs (stamens and carpels) that are typically surrounded by a brightly coloured corolla (petals) and a green calyx (sepals) \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eb) The finest individuals out of a number of people or things\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe finest individual stood, swaying, on lager and a nice bit of toilet-cistern flavoured Charlie, in the centre of the vibrant crowd of young people. A male. His masculinity proved by his seed bearing, reproductive organs, somewhat apparent beneath the premium viscose and cotton mix of the groin area of his trousers. Floral pattern on shirt. You used to get beaten up, in the old days, for being a homosexual, if you wore a floral shirt like that. These finest individuals are typically surrounded by other brightly coloured finest individuals. Fight each other later. Girlfriends drag them off each other\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMental Beauty and Poverty and The Silence of Flowers . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArborvitae: unchanging friendship, Aster: symbol of love, daintiness. Bachelor’s Button: single blessedness. Basil: good wishes. Bay tree: glory: Begonia: beware. Belladonna: silence. Bittersweet: truth. Black-eyed Susan: justice. Bluebell: humility. Borage: bluntness, directness. Butterfly weed: let me go. Chrysanthemum, red: I love you. Chrysanthemum, yellow: slighted love. Chrysanthemum, white: truth. Clematis: mental beauty. Clematis, evergreen: poverty\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Meaning of Flowers:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMilltown \u003cbr\u003eOmagh \u003cbr\u003eSean Grahams \u003cbr\u003eEnniskillen \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWeeping families in black – not psychedelia\u003cbr\u003eFlowers \u003cbr\u003eFlowers in and on hearse vehicles\u003cbr\u003eLinked arms\u003cbr\u003eCarrying coffins with flowers\u003cbr\u003eCrowds – holding flowers\u003cbr\u003eTV cameras – filming the flowers\u003cbr\u003ePolice – standing beside the flowers\u003cbr\u003eEnemies can see the beauty of each other’s flowers\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlower wreaths – mums, dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, friends, colleagues, local tradespeople, neighbours\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(NOTE) 1998. This was the year of the Good Friday Agreement.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeal Brown\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58075141144950,"sku":null,"price":50.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-Belfast-Fundraiser-2026-001X.jpg?v=1781261924"}],"url":"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/open-edition.oembed","provider":"Sorika","version":"1.0","type":"link"}