Botanic Dreams and Marriage Bonds
Botanic Dreams Installation
Botanic Dreams explores the relationship between domestic labour, gendered knowledge, and the social structures that shaped women’s lives. Drawing on Carl Linnaeus’ eighteenth-century botanical taxonomy, which used the language of marriage and reproduction to describe plant sexuality, the work reclaims these metaphors through the traditionally feminised practice of embroidery.
The coverlet design maps the layout of Linnaeus’ botanical garden at Uppsala, incorporating stitched flowers and plant classifications alongside contemporary social and professional hierarchies within the appliquéd plots. By employing embroidery to reveal the structures that shaped women’s positions within eighteenth-century elite English society, the work transforms a domestic pastime into a method of quiet observation and social commentary. The marriage bed, its frame entwined with white roses and myrtle, becomes a space of both aspiration and ambiguity: evoking dreams of romance, love, security, and domestic happiness while revealing the social expectations, restrictions, and inequalities embedded within these ideals of marriage and femininity.
Alongside Marriage Bonds, the work considers the bed as a shifting cultural symbol: a space where ideas of intimacy, security, knowledge, and authority are constructed and contested.
Marriage Bonds Installation
Marriage Bonds reimagines the same four-poster bed as a site of control rather than romance. Wrapped in heavy chains, the work transforms a symbol of intimacy and security into one of restraint, questioning the historical promise of marriage as both protection and fulfilment.
The embroidered coverlet, white roses, and myrtle of Botanic Dreams have been stripped away, leaving only stark white sheets that evoke the institutional spaces in which women's lives and behaviours have historically been regulated, judged, and controlled. Draped around the bed, the chains form a permeable cage: neither solid nor impenetrable, but a structure of restraint that echoes the subtle ways control can operate within intimate relationships. Devoid of romantic symbolism, the bed becomes a place where care and confinement become indistinguishable.
In dialogue with Botanic Dreams, the installation reveals the slippage from aspiration to confinement, exposing the ways in which ideals of love, domesticity, and feminine virtue have historically reinforced patriarchal authority. The chains become a material metaphor for the entanglement of care and duty with submission and control, making visible the power structures concealed within the institution of marriage.
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