Video by @my.willingness
In their ephemerality, flowers create space for healing. They remind us that nothing is fixed, and that expression itself can restore. These works honor the sacredness found in transformation.
Art is a vessel for the unseen. It is a way of giving form to emotion, energy, and the quiet undercurrents that shape our inner and outer landscapes. In my practice, flowers become the medium through which this dialogue unfolds.
Because they are inherently impermanent, their beauty is inseparable from their fading. Created in conversation with time and place, these installations invite viewers to step into an experience of nature not as ornament, but as mirror, reflecting both our fragility and our resilience.
FERAL
DEVOTION
Created for Valentine’s Day, this installation plunged into the fevered intensity of love and its capacity to possess, to consume, to disorient. Inspired by the charged stillness of the red room imagined by David Lynch, the space was drenched in crimson with heavy draping and saturated florals, creating a landscape without beginning or end, a place where you could get lost completely.
Within this immersive red, desire became obsession. Boundaries blurred. The flowers, lush and overwhelming, seemed to breathe alongside the viewer, amplifying the sense of surrender — of losing yourself completely, caught between passion and delirium.
Here, love was not tender. It was claiming. It was confusing. It was madness.
Feral Devotion February 2026
The Hildebrandt, Cleveland, Ohio
LUME
Lume is a meditation on illumination as presence rather than permanence. Temporary by design, the work exists for a single day. Yet, its impermanence is not a limitation.
At its core, this exhibition explores surrender. In the act of letting go, what is fleeting and fragile becomes luminous. Presence itself becomes the light.
The two central works, Softly, Gently and Unyielding, balance fragility and resolve. Composed of flowers and humble produce, their natural materials offer quiet support and speak to the deeper rhythms and wisdom inherent in nature.
LUME, January 2026
Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio
HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN
Inspired by “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen, this exhibition explores hope within darkness and the quiet truth that brokenness is not failure, but an opening.
The works reflect themes of universal duality — the opposites make the whole; light and shadow, grief and gratitude, fear and devotion. The earliest pieces emerged from a period of deep sadness. In hindsight, they revealed a greater capacity to hold complexity and to receive beauty more fully; that tenderness is born from having walked through the dark.
Later works trace the tension between past and possibility. They ask what becomes available when we choose trust over self-abandonment and allow a new story to be written.
Created entirely on-site in the days leading up to the exhibition, the work required surrender, allowing the flowers to lead. Opening at the spring equinox, a moment of equal light and dark, the show stands as a meditation on balance, transformation, and the quiet courage it takes to let the light in.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
Cohen, Lenard. “Anthem.” The Future, Columbia Records, 1992. Album.
HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN, March 2025
Tremont Incubator, Cleveland, Ohio
I SHALL NOT SURVIVE YOU
The title of this multimedia show is taken from a book of Victorian floriography, the symbolic language of flowers. Floriography is an ancient cryptological practice reflecting the psychic life of flowers to communicate emotions to their viewers. Flowers, like symbols, point to something beyond themselves, an emotional depth of reality unseen, but felt in the universal experiences of love and loss. In “I shall not survive you,” Kate Rutter’s floral installations create portals into the artist’s personal history; at first thrown into the woes of pregnancy, the artist finds resilience as a single mother, and reprieve, joy, and healing through communion with flowers.
While these works carry the rhythms of travel and longing, the blossoming and dissolution of romantic love, and the transience of her son’s father, this show intends to uplift and transform. Rutter’s collages and floral pieces inform each other; while collage is fragmentary in nature, each floral work attempts to capture and totally heal a distinct emotion experienced in her spiritual journey into motherhood.
The brevity of this show is intentional. In this week-long experience of impermanence, each bloom will peak in its beauty and vitality, and then fade into a new form. Rutter’s use of an organic material allows for a transfer of energy and healing from one life to another.
I SHALL NOT SURVIVE YOU, December 2022
Kink Contemporary, Cleveland, Ohio
