Cor Meum, Domus Mea
My Heart, My Home

Created for the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, this series began with a question: what do flowers and gardens mean to me?

Rather than looking outward, I set a boundary. Everything in this work is drawn from within 200 metres of my studio. I wanted to construct a world from what was already around me.

At its centre is a piece of driftwood, generously lent by Godwin Bradbeer. Twisted and almost fossilised, it felt as though it already held a thousand stories. I set out to tell one more.

It had been some time since I had stepped into the studio to create new work. As I began building the set and shaping the light, I was struck by an unexpected sense of calm.

This object, weathered and worn, created a feeling of stillness and familiarity. As it slowly turned under the lens, new forms emerged, shifting silhouettes, moods, and quiet gestures. The work began to reveal itself.

I realised I was in a place of safety. A space where objects were not only seen for what they are, but for what they evoke. A place where imagination could unfold without interruption.

This series became an exploration of that feeling. A response, perhaps, to the instability and noise beyond the studio. A return to the immediate. To what is close. To what is known.

Flowers became central to this language. Not as decoration, but as symbols of beauty, fragility, time, and transformation. They sit in tension with the permanence of the driftwood: soft against hard, fleeting against enduring, new against old.

My relationship with nature has largely been shaped by the inner urban. It was flowers that first brought recognition to my work, and they continue to carry a personal and historical weight.

I think of the still lifes of Robert Mapplethorpe, where form, symbolism, and sensuality coexist with precision and restraint.

In this series, flowers are not passive subjects. They hold presence. They mark the passing of time. They carry emotion.

Home, for me, is not a fixed place. It is a state that holds contradiction, love and hurt, warmth and cold, beauty and melancholy, life and death. It is where we are most open, and most exposed.

These works attempt to hold that space.

In their brief and fragile bloom, these living forms express a full spectrum of experience. They remind us that even within the smallest radius, entire worlds can exist.

Robert Earp