An exhibition of new paintings by Cynthia Imogen Hammond will be on view at La Boîte Ludique, 86 Av. Laurier Ouest, Montréal, QC H2T 2N4 from 30 May to 30 July, 2026. (Click here for the press release in French and English.) The opening event will take place on May 30 from 3-5:30pm. To accommodate sound sensitivities, this event is low-volume: hushed voices will be appreciated. The exhibition is available to visit by appointment May 31 to July 30, 2026. Please note that La Boîte Ludique is on the top floor of a 3-story walkup; virtual visits may be arranged: please email cynthia.i.hammond@gmail.com to set a time 🌿

Since 2008 I have researched and made art about gardens designed and cared for by women. In this series, “Fleurir” (to bloom, to flourish), I turn to my own garden, painting individual and “family” portraits of flowers I have loved, cultivated (or tried to cultivate), admired from afar, and dreamt about. Painted as twilight scenes, these images show the leaves and petals of beloved plants emerging brightly against dark, shimmering backgrounds. While insects and birds appear occasionally, in this series I prioritize floral beauty and vitality. The series has been a way for me to engage with plants not just as elements within a garden design, but as entities and presences in their own right. In this work, I seek to bring into representation the flowers’ essence as “vibrant matter” (Jane Bennett, 2010) and to humbly pay attention in ways that my hurried life has not always permitted. Plants, explains Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, are elders and teachers. They are, for Wall Kimmerer, our kin. She writes, “humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn – we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live … They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have …” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013).

To see plants as teachers profoundly alters the habitual relationship with the vegetal world as something to consume, control, eradicate, force into abundance, demote to background, reduce to ornament. These are the typical human-plant relationships as known under white suprematist, patriarchal capitalism. Even to make flower paintings is an act that risks participating in a tradition of visual objectification and consumption with which I am uneasy. Does it matter to start from a place of reverence as well as attentiveness? More and more I am convinced that the way forward (itself a notion of progression and linearity that belongs to a western worldview) is to worship the earth, to act in reverence to nature, to be humble before a wasp, a weed, and to be wonderstruck by the capacity of nature – to which we intrinsically belong, as the animals that we are – to return, even after humans have done their worst. The more I learn from and about plants and animals, the less I understand the hold that gods, money, and power have over human beings. I never understood it to begin with.

Art historian and plant thinker Giovanni Aloi writes, “Acknowledging that the otherness of plants is truly valuable and must be respected as a genuine type of diversity can assist us in returning to that slow, vegetal, discursive process that was already engrained in our evolutionary history but that colonialism, capitalism, and the anthropocentric philosophies of the West have taught us to disregard, or even reject, as signs of weakness. This form of miseducation has dramatically impoverished our world, culturally as well as ecologically” (Botanical Revolutions, 2025).

What if we were to recognize plants as collaborators, as agential beings, as subjects with cultural and political histories, whose knowledge and interspecies relationships tie them to time and place in ways far richer than ours? What if we were to think with the fact that we would not exist without plants at all? Aloi asserts, “plants have made us humans. It is now time to give them credit for the immense role they have played in our creative evolutionary journey” (Botanical Revolutions, 2025).

Above left: Le Romarin et l’abeille, 5 x 7″. Centre: Crocus, 5 x 7″. Right: Morning Glories, 6 x 8″. All acrylic on canvas, 2026.

Are flower paintings the most powerful way to give such credit? I suspect there are better ways. But making art with and about the love I have for the plants I have cherished throughout my life is my way of “learning to listen” to my plant kin (Wall Kimmerer).

The paintings are also an homage to the lasting impact of my early encounters with a woman’s “floral universe” (Annmarie Adams, 2018). My mother, Rosalind Faith Hammond (1937-2008) was not a gardener. But she expressed her love for plants and flowers through her domestic vision, which included hand-painting a garden on the walls and furniture of our dining room, collecting hundreds of pieces of floral cotton, and immersing herself in books about folk visual culture, such as Ukrainian Petrykivka, Russian Khokhloma, and simple, symmetrical Scandinavian folk art. Above all she loved Liberty of London, the elite British fabric emporium whose prints are known for their richly detailed expression of floral beauty. Faith made clothes for herself and her four daughters using this very finely woven cotton “lawn”. But most of all she liked to look at flowers: her stacks of floral fabric, her library books about hand-painted wooden furniture, or bouquets of peonies from the garden, bringing their creamy beauty and astonishing numbers of ants into the house.

So strong is the association between my mother and flowers that one of my earliest memories of Faith does not even include her, physically. When I was 5 years old, my mother had been absent from our home for a long time, several weeks at least. She had been caring for my older sister in the hospital, but was coming home at last. My twin and I went with friends of the family to the famous flower market in Covent Garden to look for a welcome home gift: flowers. During the car ride home, I gazed at the enormous bouquet of pale pink geraniums we chose, awed by their beauty and scent, imagining how happy my mother would be to receive this present. This anticipation of her pleasure fused with my own, anticipated joy of being reunited with her. Even through the ultimate absence that is death, flowers continue to connect me with my mother. Perhaps it is for this reason that most of the paintings in the Fleurir series have a black band around the edge of the frame.

So, the effect of luminous florals emerging from a dark background is something I loved from childhood, the history of western art’s obsession with the same not then being known to me. My mother was the source and amplification of this love, choosing fabrics for each of us as reflections of how she saw us. For me, she chose exactly this style of print. In the images above are pictures of two dresses she made for me at about the age of three, c. 1972-73.

My mother was an intensely private person, someone who remained mysterious to me her whole life. The floral universe she created for herself and for us, her children, was a precious way to connect with her. It remains alive for me, as a powerful trace of her creativity, which itself has been a beacon illuminating my pathway as a feminist artist. Faith’s floral universe was also a visual and material respite within a home where my father’s unhappiness, addictions, and violence reigned. Flowers emerging from darkness were little lifelines to something beautiful and hopeful, a life force that, no matter what happened, was never destroyed, which always re-emerged. Like spring itself.

My friend, the poet and artist Stéphanie Filion wrote in her May 2026 newsletter, “I continue to reflect on this idea of ​​keeping: what I protect, what I hide, what I don’t show, what is given to me temporarily, what I have custody of” (the original French reads: “Je continue de réfléchir à cette idée de garder : ce que je protège, ce que je cache, ce que je ne montre pas, ce qui m’est donné de façon temporaire, ce dont j’ai la garde”). Through Fleurir, I see clearly in my art something that is already visible in my garden, home, clothes, dishes, my gifts to others, my sources of delight in the world: that I too inhabit a floral universe. It is fed by the memories of my mother; all my friends who, like me, love their floral Liberty prints; the gardens I have had the privilege to work in, and on, as an artist, and every bloom in the little garden in Verdun that is mine for a few more years to care for and cherish. I “keep” this blossoming and blooming close by, as it is the source for my own flourishing.

10% of all proceeds from Fleurir will be donated to a Montreal shelter for women and children. The collection may be viewed in advance here.

Sources:

Annmarie Adams, Les Jardins des femmes: Cynthia Imogen Hammond. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, 2018.

Giovanni Aloi, Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art. Getty Publications, 2025.

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Stéphanie Filion, “Ce que je garde.” Labo Papier (newsletter), 1 May 2026.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.