The Evolution of an Art installation
- anna9694
- May 14
- 3 min read
From relationships to loss, Anna Masters charts the evolution of an art installation as her life and perspective changes
Mapping how ideas can change over time
This April, I was honoured to be included in the Floral Eras exhibition at the Regency Townhouse in Hove. It's a venue that's so evocative and which has always lingered in my mind as a place I'd love to create work for. So when an opportunity to exhibit there popped up on my Instagram feed, I wasn't going to miss it.
Kate Langdale, curator of the exhibition, was looking for florists, artists and designers to respond to the theme of flowers over time. For me - a lover of personal and intimate stories - the response was to immediately go to an internal clock; to chart my own personal history through the evolution of an artwork over decades. And coincidentally, I'd already inadvertently started on this journey.
The making of an art installation
My journey into installation art started at university. I was 21 and in a relationship that, for some reason, I struggled to reconcile myself with. Looking back, I wonder if I was just too young to really comprehend ideas like 'forever', though I felt inately that I should. I found myself repetitively painting the dried up petals of the roses that my then-boyfriend had bought me. I couldn't work out what they meant. Was it love, or was it dead love?
And after painting multitudes of meticulously detailed petals, I started to wonder, 'why paint a replica of the thing in front of me?' I started stitching these petals directly onto wires, and eventually, the start of my installation practice was born. It culminated in my degree show - a suspended installation of rose petals, stems, and a ball of thorns suspended in the middle. I called it Compost Forest, a nod towards the metamorphosis of meaning and value that the rose had undergone.
The evolution of the idea - a new suspended art installation
Many years later, after a detour away from my artistic practice into arts administration and a joyous year of travel, I found myself in a job that I couldn't endure. I secured a small commission and, pushed to my brink at work, I decided to take the leap back into my artistic practice. I returned to painting, but, when my dad died after a short illness, it was flowers that called me back. I felt the need to create something beautiful out of the things around me that were fragile, fragmented and destroyed. I returned to the format of the suspended installation, using the skills that I was familiar with, but this installation felt different. It was more melancholy, more searching, lighter somehow. I referenced the ground by suspneding a layer of pebbles, and, hidden within the cloud of petals, were a collection of vintage butterflies; trapped in this moment.
Designing a new floral installation
It is from this place that I responded to Kate's brief. I wanted to use the delicate and ambiguous language of flowers (discussed more in this journal post) to explore how my relationship to grief had changed in the years between this first response and now - 14 years later. Rather than 'floral eras', I was mapping my own eras.
In this piece, I wanted to be more explicit in the enduring loss that I felt - at the base of the work, creating a landscape of predominantly broken, empty and disused stems. But I wanted the final work to feel lighter, freer and more full of movement and possibility than the original. The weight and heaviness of grief had lifted, and though it lingered like a spectre, it felt less oppressive. I wanted the new work to communicate this.
It took five days to install the artwork - during which time Kate and I would share the space and our stories, finding surprising synergies between our lives. My vision of the installation changed as I worked on it - though the intention and concept remained the same throughout.
Distant Lands (How I Wished I Was Someone Else), 2026
The Floral Eras exhibition ran 24-26 April 2026 at the Regency Townhouse in Hove, and was a stunning showcase of both florists and artists. If you'd like to stay up-to-date with future exhibitions, please consider signing up to my mailing list, here.
Anna x
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