Hundreds of flowers collected from Georgia cemeteries have new life on the eastside trail of the Atlanta Beltline.
A massive seven-foot-tall skull that sits under the shade of the Fourth Ward office buildings just across from New Realm Brewing has caught the eyes of passersby since it was installed earlier this month. Its size and intricate patchwork of flowers that covers the entire surface make it hard to miss.
The art piece titled, “Steered by Falling Stars,” is the work of University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art Director Joseph Peragine and Professor of Art Mary Hallam Pearse. The pair say it explores themes of love, death, loss, and celebration of life by utilizing discarded artificial flowers once placed on gravesites.
“I don’t want someone to look at it in a morbid way,” Peragine said of the thousands of city residents who have likely had their attention piqued by the creation.
“Hopefully it has the sense, much like the Day of the Dead celebrations, where it comes around once a year, and they’re really thinking about the memory of the folks that they loved and lost,” he said.
Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Pearse — who teaches in the jewelry and metals department — is a familiar face at multiple cemeteries across Georgia, particularly those near Athens where she spent months picking up discarded plastic flowers on the outskirts of graveyards and even in their dumpsters.
“I would hope for bad weather because it’s when we have bad weather and there’s lots of wind that these flowers will blow off the grave sites,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
But it wasn’t long before staff at some of the cemeteries began collecting flowers for the art professor and had garbage bags full for her when she showed up on the weekends.
Each flower that makes up the skull’s surface carries its own story.
In Athens, a maintenance worker and a student personally brought Pearse flowers from their family’s graves. And some of the flowers that encompass the installation are from the Winder cemetery after the horrific Apalachee High School shooting shook the town.
“They see it as them participating in this project with us,” she said. “People have found it to be really meaningful that flowers actually have another life outside of them being markers on their family cemeteries.”
George Mathis/AJC
George Mathis/AJC
The art project is part of the “...an Atlanta Biennial...” organized by The Temporary Art Center from Oct. 3 through Nov. 3. Just down the stairs from Peragine and Pearse’s piece, visitors can peruse the exhibition of about 30 Atlanta-based artists.
Peragine, who worked at Georgia State for nearly three decades before his current role at UGA, said he started using skulls in his work during the pandemic — the same time Pearse began collecting flowers for her art. But neither have tackled the subject matter quite like this before.
“The scale of it just seemed very important ... anything smaller than that just wouldn’t hold up,” he said. “It just felt it needed to be monumental.”
The installation itself took around six months to create and was pieced together in slices carved on a CNC-router — a computer-controlled machine. The different parts were stacked and glued together to create the final seven-foot-tall structure. While it was transported to the Beltline in parts, it will have to be removed as a whole.
There was even a moment in the process where the pair considered using real flowers instead of artificial, Peragine said.
“But in the end, I think that the fact that they’re plastic flowers that had a life before celebrating someone who’s dead and made out of material that will not disintegrate,” he said, “there’s a very nice circle that’s being closed.”
Peragine and Pearse both agree that they hope viewers don’t look at the piece as insensitive to the idea of death.
“I hope that people find beauty in this,” Pearse said. “A reminder of the beauty of life.”
Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
