Exhibition: Coded Blooms – Museum of Australian Photography

‘Flowers have long stood in for what could not be spoken aloud: sex, death, longing, defiance. Soft in appearance yet potent in meaning, they are among art history’s great deceivers. Across centuries and cultures, the bloom has functioned as a visual code, a form artists have returned to, reclaimed and rewritten to speak about desire, power and taboo.

CODED BLOOMS begins with the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose flower photographs form the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, these works establish a charged framework for a contemporary rereading of the floral. In Mapplethorpe’s hands, the bloom becomes sculptural, erotic and exacting, stripped of sentiment and sharpened into form.

From this point, four artists push the floral beyond polite still life traditions into unruly and intimate terrain. Pat Brassington, Del Kathryn Barton, Jake Preval and Meng-Yu Yan each approach the flower as a site of psychological tension, bodily presence and relational meaning. Here, petals, shadows and surfaces operate as signals, carrying what is hidden, forbidden or quietly radical. In Brassington’s images, the bloom hovers within a charged psychological space; Barton amplifies it into symbols of desire, transformation and the feminine psyche. Preval lingers on the flower’s vulnerability after its peak, while Yan traces intimacy through shadow and silhouette. Together, these artists confirm that flowers have never been innocent.’ MoAP website.

‘CODED BLOOMS came from thinking about the hidden meanings behind flowers. We give them when we’re falling in love, when we’re saying goodbye, when we’re trying to apologise, when words feel impossible. For centuries in painting and visual culture, the bloom has stood in for the body, for sex, for fertility, for desire, often replacing genitalia or becoming a coded way of speaking about intimacy. That history is always there, whether we notice it or not. Looking at flowers through a feminist and queer lens makes these codes visible again. Mapplethorpe didn’t invent the erotic flower, but he sharpened it within photography, and the artists in this exhibition take it somewhere psychological, bodily and deeply human. Essentially, this show is about love and what we struggle to say out loud.‘ Angela Connor senior curator MoAP.

Photograph above: Robert Mapplethorpe: Poppy 1988. 50.32 x 47.47 cm Dye imbibition print.

Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Victoria 7-24 March 2026