Forget-Me-Not is a series of digital photographic embroideries that construct a kaleidoscope of decorative flower motifs, drawing from a variety of sources: vintage flower embroidery pattern books, encyclopedias of ornamental design, and dictionaries of colour combinations. The project extends my ongoing interest in working with found images and employing collage as a strategy to bring diverse materials into dialogue. However, unlike previous works—which engaged with disparate image histories, specific political events, or locations—this project directly addresses vernacular cultural traditions and visual languages that predate the photographic.

My selection of sources reflects a critique of the 19th-century colonial enterprise, in which white men catalogued the visual forms and decorative traditions of ‘other’ cultures, incorporating them into the production of Western-dominated knowledge. This process fixed a plethora of visual languages into rigid frameworks. Forget-Me-Not interrogates Western archival knowledge and the colonial legacies of categorising the visual forms of the ‘other’—such as the way natural history classification schemes displaced vernacular knowledge.

Conceived as a collection of 12 digital embroidery patterns—one for each month of the year—the project, in its completed form, will rethink the subordination of vernacular traditions by modernity. So far, I have completed only the embroidery for May, printed on synthetic textile for outdoor exhibition. My intention is to finish all 12 embroideries, transforming them into a design pattern with multiple applications, ultimately printed on organic textiles. By doing so, the project will generate an alternative system of floral ornamentation—one based not on fixity, but on the continuous circulation of visual forms.