Katiemo’s pictures are a modern update on Flower Power: promoting peace and love, as well as the psychedelic and carefree with the glorious colouration.
Flower Power emerged as a protest against the Vietnam War, with its art and symbolism permeating the counterculture of the late 1960s. With flowers on their clothes and in their hair, the hippies of that era became known as “flower children.” The image of the flower, much like the artwork of Katiemo, continues to evoke themes of peace and love today.
flowers set into a flower, set into a flower
These flower signs were commissioned by garden designer Kathryn Cox, as part of her show garden called the ‘Flower Power Field’ at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024. The ‘Flower Power Field’ itself paid tribute to the iconic Woodstock music festival.
In this context Katiemo’s musical reference can perhaps be seen in the ‘dancing’ of the flowers and their energetic composition in their swaying in the invisible wind. Katiemo herself notes, ‘music has influenced my art since I began illustrating back in 2007’.
While the hippies were Westerners, the imagery of the flower as a counter to the weapon and war has been around since the times of early Buddhism and Hinduism. Thus, in the ‘flower power’ art of Katiemo, we are seeing the modern integration of East and West. I would add that this integration is allied to the power of women.
In ‘Flower Power’, we see flowers set into a flower, set into a flower. The insistence is that the flower is the frame and the garden of the flower. The idea seems to be that the flower is union, that it has the strength of unity, that is what ‘flower power’ is. As a political statement of peace and love, the image may perhaps be shaped by the connotations of femininity and sisterhood, as the central flower is pink which is associated with women in the West. Again, women are often compared to or seen as flowers. It seems that ‘flower power’ is being revisited to make a comment about women’s rights in the contemporary period: the idea that women are powerful, peaceful and loving.
In ‘Peace’, too, the dominance of the pink also seems to indicate femininity and a female version of peace against an implicit war which may be regarded as masculine. The image perhaps draws on the idea of ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’. Or that men are war-like and women are loving.
In ‘Love’, the heart frame is again pink. With its connotations of femininity once again. The word ‘LOVE’ is done in green, which suggests that the basis of this love is in the love of nature. That love is for what grows in the light, for what is beautiful in the flower, for the life of the flowers. Love for beauty, growth, life. Rather than ugly war and the taking of lives, given the ‘flower power’ connotations.
The Flower Power photograph by Bernie Boston, taken during the March on the Pentagon, October 21, 1967
In each case, the abstract concepts of ‘power’, ‘peace’ and ‘love’ are contextualised within the concrete, living world of nature and the flowers. Life is breathed into them through the petals and the abstractions are made concrete and real, integrated into nature and the real world. This is a worldly art that resists the removal of idealistic concepts into the realms of rationality and intellectual thought. And, at the same time, each image is shaped by contrast: by the war making world of humans, for human strife and trouble, for drab human colours that cannot rival the grace, beauty and colouration of the flowers.
About the Artist
Katie (AKA Katiemo) grew up in the artist’s town of St. Ives on the north coast of Cornwall in England. Inspired by her creative mother and aunt and regular visits to local galleries and open studios, she went to study at Falmouth College of Arts. Having since graduated from Central Saint Martins, she currently lives and works in London.