Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago Park District
I was asked to propose an idea for an installation in the Garfield Park Conservatory Chrysanthemum show that takes place around Halloween. I had the idea to do pieces carved out of styrofoam to look like stone. They were inspired by architectural grotesqerie such as gargoyles, but instead of being on buildings, they would be kind of hanging around cemetery monuments. A poem by Thomas Hardy, The Last Chrysanthemum, was inscribed on the monuments, so as you walked around the exhibit you read the poem a verse at a time.
We also arranged some good-quality artificial skeletons to look like gardeners at work.

Why should this flower delay so long
To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun
Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call
Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,
The season's shine is spent,
Nothing remains for it but shivering
In tempests turbulent.

Had it a reason for delay,
Dreaming in witlessness
That for a bloom so delicately gay
Winter would stay its stress?

I talk as if the thing were born
With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
By the Great Face behind.