Series of 25
Anna Ridler and the price of peonies.
Peonies are romantic and ephemeral. They are also a lucrative commodity. This paradox prompted Anna Ridler to excavate the social, industrial, economic and environmental factors hidden behind the flowers we take for granted in florists and supermarkets.
Price Per Stem is a series of 25 unique artworks. Each one comprises a paired physical and digital element.
The physical element entails 56 photographs of real peonies, taken by Anna in her studio. Once printed, each peony is annotated with its market price.
These photographs form the basis of the corresponding digital element – a single imagined peony in video form, generated from the 56 real peonies. To create her digital flowers, Anna created an intricate model based on data and events that influence the price of peonies, from fluctuations in weather to holidays like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day associated with surges in demand.
To complete the digital element, Anna traced choice moments from each peony and layered them over fluctuating prices. In this final step, the peonies are reconnected with the physical world.
Abstract concepts like time, value and desire find grounding in the earthly objects Anna chooses to express them with like coral, flowers and sea water. Anna likens her methodology to that of land artists on account of the “very slow involved way of building a system, and then allowing something that you can predict but never control to act on that system.” For example, in Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019) she programmed an image of a tulip to mutate based on the fluctuating value of Bitcoin. The output is an enchanting portrait of our collective decisions. Anna shows how everything we produce, from oil paintings to algorithms, inevitably contains fragments of our humanity.
