For the artist, flowers carry a double meaning. Receiving a bouquet once felt bittersweet: you were given something beautiful, yet it was already on its way to death. Their roots had been cut, just as she, having lost at a young age, felt her own grounding severed. This experience resonates more broadly with the reality many people of color face: histories uprooted, connections erased, identities forced to take root in new, uncertain soil.

And yet, flowers persist. Even when their roots are no longer visible, they bloom. On canvas, they shed their mortality and become immortal, transformed into witnesses of life’s most intimate moments, birth and death, love and loss, hope and farewell. A bouquet is never mere decoration; it is a ritual, a gesture, a language too delicate or too vast for words.

This work connects the personal with the collective, the fleeting with the eternal. Here, flowers are not only symbols of memory and resilience, but also of the quiet, radical truth: even when roots are hidden or cut, life finds a way to flourish.