Floral Ledger

Floral Ledger (2024) by Berend Strik combines two seemingly incompatible concepts: flowers — symbols of nature, beauty, and the ephemeral — and the ledger — a book of financial accounts, a record of debts and credits, a document of economic life.

The ledger represents the rational, quantitative, economic dimension of human existence; the flower represents the qualitative, aesthetic, emotional dimension. To combine them is to insist that both matter, that life cannot be reduced to either the economic or the aesthetic alone.

Strik frequently works with objects that bridge different domains of human experience — the domestic and the institutional, the personal and the political. A "floral ledger" is a record of something that cannot ultimately be accounted for in economic terms: the beauty of flowers, the pleasure of beauty, the value of what cannot be valued.

The textile elements in this work — fabric flowers, perhaps, or floral-patterned fabric — literally make the ledger into a floral object, blurring the boundary between accounting document and art object.

Sources: Galerie Fons Welters