Description:

A Floral Gesture. Takeaway Magnolia.

This project includes a set of 6 posters that are part of an ongoing series of collaborations between the designer and Auckland artist Monique Redmond. The prints are usually presented as a single stack of 150-200 mixed Risograph prints and a user-friendly A6-vertical perspex sign, which signposts an invitation for passersby to "help yourself". To take a bloom home or gift on, thereby engaging generosity as an agent of dispersal.

The stacks of Risograph prints are left in public places; shops, libraries, universities. Printed ephemera in the form of Risograph prints are designed to act as a takeaway floral gesture. They are disseminated by a member of the public picking one up and taking it home to enjoy, or for gifting. The gestures are made annually using photographs taken the previous season of one flowering, from the same red magnolia, in the artist’s front yard.

The fourth iteration of A Floral Gesture comprised six different Risograph prints made from iPhone photographs taken during the 2020 season's blooming of the artist's Magnolia, thus the inclusion: "one flowering" in the floral gesture text. The text is indexical and intended to be a legend of the work's existence in the world and to conceptually link the temporal and dispersed nature of its distribution across suburbs and cities.

The Risograph aesthetic is used for its immediacy and materiality; it feels temporal and lush like the duration of a magnolia in-flower. Inks used are gold, red, blue and black in various combinations. The typeface used on the print is Akzidenz-Grotesk and is an approximate match to the typeface Belgian conceptual artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers used on his exhibition invitations from 1964–1976.