Shit Flowers

<p dir="ltr">Research Background </p><p dir="ltr">Shit Flowers transforms the gallery into a digestive theatre that interrogates care, survival, and symbolic transformation through installation and live performance. Drawing on a sustained engagement with modernist spatial language and occult aesthetics, the work centres on the zinnia flower grown aboard the International Space Station in 2016—the first to bloom in zero gravity. The plant initially failed under strict scientific protocols but thrived when astronaut Scott Kelly shifted from control to intuitive attentiveness. This historical moment becomes a lens through which the installation examines how beauty and meaning persist under conditions of containment, pressure, and potential collapse, treating care not as sentiment but as resistance. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Contribution </p><p dir="ltr">This research advances understanding of how intimate, relational practices can function as forms of quiet defiance within institutional frameworks. The installation creates a sealed ecosystem where sculptural arrangements—grey objects topped with selfie lights, ghosted with plastic bags—form spectral blooms within a ceremonial logic that oscillates between séance, shrine, and schoolyard provocation. Through the integration of live performance by Dwyer's daughter Olive during openings and public programs, the work introduces shifting human presence that destabilizes symbolic reading, making intimacy itself infrastructural. The viscous substance smeared across windows literalizes the permeable boundary between inside and outside, waste and renewal, proposing metabolic cycles that refuse linear narratives of disposal or resolution. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Significance </p><p dir="ltr">Shit Flowers contributes critical methodologies for engaging with apocalyptic imagination beyond shock or moralisation. By positioning the absurd theatre of space exploration as mirror for terrestrial ritual and improvised meaning-making, the work reveals the erotics embedded in end-times fantasies while insisting on survival strategies rooted in attentiveness rather than control. The suspended question "is it shit?" operates not as provocation but as atmospheric condition, allowing the gallery to function as psychic and social gateway where everyday materials access the unseen. This research demonstrates how theatrical intimacy and playful ambiguity can metabolise cultural anxieties around collapse, offering alternatives to both surrender and rigid insistence in an era defined by environmental and existential precarity.</p>