Broken Rose
The
concept behind this lily is that the pointless locking away of a genius
was a great loss to the world. The dark exterior of the lily is meant
to suggest the oppression of Reading Gaol. Within the lily the gold pen
and paper clips represent Oscar, and the interior of the petals his
writing. I chose the story of the Nightingale and the Rose, which ends
with the rose being run over by a cartwheel. I didn’t have a cart to
hand so I substituted a Fiat 500 to find out what a run over rose would
look like. Interestingly the rose ‘bled’, but remained surprisingly
intact. I incorporated a photo of the rose into the image for this lily.
The rose could also represent Oscar’s heart, he once wrote to his lover
Bosie “my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom’.
C.3.3’s ballad
This
lily is a response to The Ballad of Reading Gaol. C.3.3 is Oscar’s
prison number, and the pseudonym he used when the ballad was first
published. The dark rivulets are meant to be suggestive of the brutality
and suffering of the prison regimen. CTW are the initials of Charles
Thomas Wooldridge whose execution is narrated in the poem. The gold pen
for the stigma represents Oscar and the stamen are prison bars.
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