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SOFT
A visual essay exploring the strength and softness within flowers.
Can softness exist without the hard? Do we require an opposing strength to relinquish the value of the other? Dualism is found in all parts of life: light and darkness, happiness and pain, individualism and connection. Softness arrives as an elemental relief to our senses, tapping into our primal need for safety, family, and warmth.
To explore one of nodi's core offerings, our SOFT series uses nature's most robust yet delicate specimen: the flower. Dahlia, Scabiosa, Aquilegia, Lily, Gladioli. Captured at dusk, in low light, blurred and in motion, we present each sculptural floral as an object that represents both strength and softness.
As the poetic scientist and nature writer Loren Eiseley observed, “we forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness, and that each one of us in our personal life repeats that miracle." She is perhaps suggesting that we can, if we choose, find ourselves in flowers, reveal a symmetry in being, and by doing so, open ourselves to something else entirely. If flowers are made of strength and softness, then so, too, are we.
Yet, when we speak about softness, what we're really talking about is natural fibre: wool, bamboo silk, jute, each chosen for their durability to hold weave and ability to beautifully soften overtime. And like our own beings, our homes, built with wood, stone or metal, used for form and function, also call for an opposing material, a sensory pause. Softness is a tactile discovery of deep comfort. Soft belly, easy exhale, loose ankles.
Images by Yasmine Ganley