Flowers for Mother

Flowers for Mother consists of thousands of wooden flowers, which the artist Georgi Markelov carved in his studio in Raja Street, Tallinn over the period of 15 years. Created as a result of machine-like repetition, these flowers are like intimate conceptualism: the idea is clear and its realisation simplified to the extreme. We can imagine that the wood used to make some of the flowers was leftover material from his Soviet-era commissioned work. We don’t know which flower comes from the same tree trunk as a portrait of Lenin or Klementi, but it doesn’t even matter. The sea of flowers is an important testament to perseverance, willpower, re-use and quiet resistance. According to Uku Sepsivart, it seems that toward the end of his life, Markelov came to depict things that are truly important.