Furari Flores (Stealing Flowers)

Furari Flores is a multisensory exhibition celebrating the wonder of plants. Incorporating sight, smell, hearing, and tactility, this project creates an immersive, sensory experience. 

Furari Flores grew out of Cara-Ann Simpson’s experience with extreme illness and a life-changing diagnosis. The Latin title translates to ‘stealing flowers’, which is a literal and metaphorical interpretation of the project and her story. It also references the continued use of a ‘dead’ language in medical and botanical taxonomies. This series is Simpson’s journey of living with disability, explored as a relationship with plants and places, and a rediscovery of identity. Broadly, this exhibit is an open conversation about connections through sensory immersion, active observation, and deep listening.

Artwork by Cara-Ann Simpson (left to right): Furari Flores brand art; Scuto Protectoris Nostri Coronati Nam Eddie 2022 (Plant: eucalyptus sideroxylon rosea (pink-flowering iron bark)); Medicinae Crescente de Terra I 2021 (Plant: Gumbi Gumbi (pittosporum angustifolium)).

Furari Flores fosters inclusive and environmentally responsible approaches to making, whilst experimenting with technologies. The project encompasses accessible design, and encourages deep connections and emotional responses. Research shows that designing for accessibility within a multisensory exhibition context benefits all visitors. Providing experiences that are multisensory supports accessibility, positive mental health, and wellbeing. This project supports multiple access points through its multisensory approach – it presents opportunities to perceive the exhibition in multiple ways.

Tactile components of this series incorporate a mixture of digital imagery, including drawings, focus-stacked photography, and spectrography. These tactile works include fabric drops, beanbag chairs and a handwoven rug.

The series also includes algorithmic focus-stacked photography of plants. Simpson embraces spectres within the individual photographs, playing with memory and the everywhen. She merges these images with spectrography and incorporates them into video and tactile works. The videos include sound, creating compositions from the site’s eco-acoustics. Through sound data, the videos share insight into weather patterns, wildlife, and the land’s health.

Likewise, the scent sculptures explore specific plants and the intangible and temporal nature of smell. Each scent investigates a specific landscape element that occurs seasonally. Elusive acacia flowers driving in winter’s air through a dry eucalyptus forest; or the spicy, earthy scent of petrichor combining with rice flower plants and eucalypts after a summer storm. 3D printed sculptures made from waste material and plant-based filaments house the scents and disperse them using nebuliser technology. 

This project sets the scent to grasp the concept of the everywhen. To ground yourself in the Earth. Breathe deeply and smell the odours that the Earth and its life-forms excrete. Feel the textures and air around you. Listen deeply to the Earth and cosmos to hear stories from every time and dimension. To dive into a landscape in macro detail and become awed by its presence and potency.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its funding and advisory body.
This project is being made possible by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, provided through Regional Arts Australia, administered in Queensland by Flying Arts Alliance.