Floral Greetings (2024) has a long pedigree, with its origins in 2010 as a live concert visualisation of an Art Song (German: Lied) by the 19th-century Austrian composer Hugo Wolf. The song itself is composed around a short 18th-century text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Blumengruss (“Floral Greeting”) the text of which focuses on an intense and lengthy process of work sunk into collecting a bouquet of flowers, as an expression of affection or love for another person. At this point in her career, LIA had worked extensively with music visualisation, but exclusively for abstract, wordless music. Working with the Wolf composition presented an opportunity to work with text as an additional layer of inspiration.  

The original visualisation was more of an abstract representation of a whole meadow of flowers; the work presented here by contrast is an extensively modified version of this code based more on the idea of a single flower. Compositionally the work was inspired by the famous Japanese ukiyo-e (“The Great Wave off Kanagawa”) by Hokusai, in which a large wave breaks into clearly structured smaller wavelets, each of which fractally decompose into wavelets of their own, alongside the further smaller layers of detail in droplets splashing off the fingers of the waves. The images in Floral Greetings (2024) are constructed following a similar schema: large elements rotate and move towards the centre of the image, becoming smaller and smaller until the individual elements partially overlap and thus, like a wavefront, “break” into finely detailed forms. 

Floral Greetings initial collectors are eligible to receive one complimentary fine art Giclée print of their work on Hahnemühle German etching paper certified by Verisart.