ROBERT HAMBLIN -
Strange Bright Blooms

Robert Hamblin’s latest body of work pursues his tender awareness of the interrelation between humans and the natural world. The work now has a growing fascination with plant eroticism, autoeroticism and sexuality and delves into the sensually charged parallels with human love and the variability and hybridisation of our own nature.
For this show, Hamblin created a new bouquet of works fastened under the auspicious title “Strange Bright Blooms”. Strange, because non-conforming to the canonical behavioural norm of humans, and in deep communion with still revolutionary botanist Carl Linnaeus’s description of flowers as 'beds' and stamina and pistils as 'husbands' and 'wives'. His “Systema Naturae” of 1735 introduced the concept of a plant’s sexual system which, if shockingly, also matter-of-factly included a variety of sexual relations from monogamy to polygyny, from homosexuality to miscegenation.
Whereas struggle and competition seem to fall inevitable in the contemporary understanding of balances in nature, Hamblin’s floral personifications of beauty, strength and seduction remain the more appealing and uniting language.