Grass Wither, Flowers Fade

Flowers are a familiar motif in the body of work of Jemima Yabes. But in her exhibition “Grass Wither, Flowers Fade,” they form the core of a year-long reflection on hope, life, and their tenacity to persist, despite their fragility.

Across her oeuvre, Yabes has pondered flora and fauna in their various states. Leaves petrified to preserve a life past in even birds do not worry (Blanc Gallery, 2022). The chopped, commodified carcasses of meat in Chops, Hams, Heads (West Gallery, 2021).

In the current show, this regard for life in all its stages, from birth to death and beyond, remains. It begins with the artist’s primary visual idiom: flowers accompany us in all stages of our life: from birthdays, sicknesses, to funerals. Just as how they are also subject to the unyielding cycle of bloom and decay.

To be so fragile yet still signify hope—such is Yabes’s take-off point for this exhibition. The spark for this realization came in 2022 when her mother was admitted to critical care. Over the course of three weeks of hospitalization, she would take photographs of flowers she would encounter in her surroundings—an act, she eventually considers, of affirming hope for her mother’s healing.

The resultant photographs are what the artist used as reference for the small canvas works in this show: twenty-one flowers for twenty-one days of her mother’s hospital stay, of seeking hope among the promises of bloom. For this exhibition, all her painted canvases depict flowers in full blossom. With oil as her medium, gumamelas and bougainvilleas are rendered in peak life and vibrancy, just as how they lent her color as well.

Altogether, the exhibition is an assertion of life despite the inevitability of perish. Grass wither, flowers fade. And still with hope, we remain.

Words by Chesca Santiago