“AWAKENING”

 “There were times when it appeared to [him] that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions.”           (Oscar Wilde) 

The artist Rebecca Louise Law has a current exhibit at HOMA (Honolulu Museum of Art) entitled “Awakening,” it is an installation of beguiling potpourris stringed together from ceiling to floor draped across thee gallery tunnel-fashion, it is a collective rain of all the petrified flowers in the world and to experience this alteration to the consciousness as one passes by is a tactile mirage. There were purple honey clovers and marigolds harp strings-like curtains, rye grass and bougainvilleas, acorns and chestnuts chimes. I was a butterfly transecting Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream bewildered by flying pollens. The hanging vines and epiphytes of roses and hydrangeas and dogwoods pinked the light. Dried fruits they were when they were still blooms. The sky fall irony of the beauty of all these dead flowers and maybe food for celestial stars - I am inside plant life’s souls’ cellular level veins, their gene strands linked by proteins and amino acids of chips of rhinestones. A feast day for rainbows and their friends and who knows whatever other magic. The artist’s message: this is your planet’s recycled meadows of waste you can’t take for granted. It was, to me, a journey to the psychedelic existence of foundational food source - for whence all foods come from flowers. I cannot bare writing of imagination I didn’t come to know or touch when I cook. Dandelion weed-grass, curly parsley, papaya compote, sage, tangerine hand-juiced, raw crystal sugar salad is an homage to what I don’t take granted by making food find ways to its own art. Chamomile-scented ribboned collard greens soup with lemon twist is my elixir that had to be real of supernova. “Awakening” made me dream more for my cooking with their real ghosts.