“Garden Tulips Northumberland Strait” (archival pigment print), by Cambridge-based Vaughn Sills, in her show “Inside Outside,’’ at the Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 28
The gallery says the show “is a series of evocative still lifes of flowers juxtaposed with land and seascapes, meditations on grieving and loss. Sills’s studio process includes pairing a chosen set of flowers with one of her landscape prints from another ongoing series about grieving for her mother. ‘Inside Outside’ considers the highly cultivated world of flowers in contrast with the natural, untamed world surrounding us. Domesticity is represented by the garden-grown flowers in vases, alluding to women’s creative work, while the natural world is represented by images of the sea and land, often shown with a foreboding sky. Thus, the work refers to the ephemeral nature of life; cut flowers are short-lived, and their beauty reminds us of life precariously balanced on the verge of death. Sadness, love, memory and grief for Sills’s mother are given form in images of the sea and misty fields, amplified now in combination with the flowers.
