Obscurely Blooming (2023) is a series of five unique digital works, each depicting a British wildflower titled after its archaic common name: The Boneflower (daisy), The Great Herb (foxglove), Lazarus Bell (snakeshead fritillary), First Rose (primrose), and Devil's Plague (wild carrot). Each work is governed by a smart contract that causes the image to decay at a fixed rate over five years — but the decay is only made visible when the work changes wallet. A piece held by one collector in perpetuity remains static; the moment it is traded, its accumulated decay becomes apparent. After five years the work rebloom, returning to its original state. The work draws on a line from John Clare: 'their decay is the green life of change; to pass away and come again in blooms revivified.' By making the blockchain's transaction record legible as a physical condition of the image, the work renders financial speculation visible — the work's appearance is the history of what has been done to it in the market.
This series sits within my ongoing interest in using smart contract mechanisms not as a distribution or authentication layer but as a conceptual material — a way of building the work's argument into its infrastructure. The five flowers were chosen for their dual nature: ordinary British wildflowers that also carry histories of toxicity, scarcity, and shifting symbolic meaning across centuries. The images were made using bespoke machine learning models trained on original datasets alongside my own drawings and paintings of the plants. Each work is accompanied by a research packet — quotes from Clare, process notes, drawings, scans from my garden — that travels with the work through successive collectors via the NFT. The decay mechanism asks a specific question: what does the market do to a living thing? A work that is held attentively remains whole; a work that is traded accumulates the marks of its own circulation.
Exhibited in 'In-Valuable: The Short History Of Crypto Art', curated by Marlène Corbun and Fanny Lakoubay, laCollection platform, 2023
The contract address for this work is 0x63e0fd00c956c421c4409fdf14374c29b3556633 (Polygon). The work is held on Raster: https://www.raster.art/artwork/948319