THE FLOWER AS WITNESS: 2013–2026
An analytical text for the exhibition at Sabine Wachters Fine Arts
When Jean-Luc Godard described the flowers growing at the edges of motorways as “roadside refugees,” he identified something that most landscape painting had preferred not to see: that the ornamental and the dispossessed occupy the same marginal ground, tolerated by the infrastructure that passes them without stopping. It was this image, or the logic behind it, that initiated David Powell’s flower series in 2013, and which has continued to organise it across thirteen years of compounding crises.
A second question has run alongside the first since the beginning, simpler to state but no less demanding in its consequences: what happens when you take away the vase? The vase is the domesticated container, the device that announces a flower has been cut, arranged, and made safe for consumption, resolved before it can be looked at. Remove it, and the flower has nowhere sanctioned to be. It must be somewhere else instead: rooted in contested ground, pressed against a boundary line, held inside an industrial structure not built for it, disarticulated against black. Every structural device the series has developed since, the boundary diagonal, the cellular membrane, the vitrine, the fence, is an answer to that question, worked out one painting at a time. The flowers are not symbols of nature against culture, or of beauty against violence. They are witnesses: placed in scenes that determine their conditions of survival, unable to speak, unable to leave, and, crucially, unable to retreat into the vase’s promise of safety.
From Figures to Flowers: The Founding Substitution
The earliest work in the series, Refugees (2013), began with a human figure, a body in a boarded-up doorway, presence barely legible as presence. Powell then made a substitution: the figure became a flower. This is not a gentle move. It does not aestheticise what it replaces. The flower inherits the full weight of both the singular life and the anonymous crowd, carrying what the figure carried without resolving it into readability. In a world that makes human legibility dangerous, where the visible body is the targeted body, the displacement onto a bloom that will survive or not survive according to conditions not of its choosing is not evasion. It is the most direct method available.
Writing about the 2012–13 paintings for the first exhibition It is the month of May…for me at Sabine Wachters Fine Arts in Knokke, Anja Novak identified what she called the series’ “indeterminacy”, its refusal to settle between the figurative and the abstract, the narrative and the lyrical. Inge Swinkels, writing in the same catalogue, described the flowers as inhabiting their painted spaces “alongside the space, in the space, with the space, but not in spite of the space.” Both formulations were accurate then, and remain accurate now. But the decade since has clarified what that indeterminacy contains, and what that co-existence costs. The ambiguity is no longer primarily pictorial. The spaces the flowers inhabit have names: freeports, special economic zones, settler-colonial territories, post-industrial sites of managed abandonment. The indeterminacy has been administered.
Structural Geometries and the Space of Exclusion
Refugees (2013) establishes the formal logic that will sustain the entire series. A strong geometric architecture, hard-edged, institutional, neither quite interior nor exterior, determines the conditions of the flowers’ presence. Pink, sage, and black planes suggest a makeshift hoarding, a construction fence, an exhibition wall repurposed as barrier. The yellow diagonal line cutting the lower third carries unambiguous civic coding: keep back, do not cross. The flowers occupy the shallow ledge between that barrier and the architectural backdrop, pressed into whatever space remains. They are not thriving. They are persisting.
Swinkels, in 2013, drew on the myth of Narcissus, the figure punished by transformation into a flower, reduced from occupant to environment, “his life reduced to the bare essentials: breathing, being”, as a way of reading the series’ de-centring of the human. In 2013, this read as a productive inversion: the flower granted autonomy, the human figure displaced from its habitual dominance. By 2026, the myth has shed its mythological distance. To be reduced to bare life, breathing, being is not a punishment from Ovid; it is a legal category produced by zone-based governance. The flowers inhabiting these painted spaces do not inhabit them in spite of the geometry. They inhabit them because the geometry is what determines their permissible existence.
Stock Still, Side by Side (2023) applies this structural thinking at a different scale. A yellow diagonal cuts corner to corner across a large square canvas, dividing a painterly industrial-pastoral landscape, smokestack, pale sky, scrubby ground, from what appears to be a calibration chart, a printer’s test pattern of the kind used to verify colour accuracy before the actual image begins. Sunflowers grow in front of both zones, indifferent to the ontological divide between the painted and the schematic. The painting poses a question the series has been approaching for years: what does it mean to witness when the ground of witness is itself unstable? When reality and its administrative representation coexist as parallel surfaces that do not resolve into each other?
Material and Method: The Texture of Urgency
The formal evolution of the series tracks its historical arc with unusual directness. The 2013 work is executed with a clarity that belongs to a period when the crisis was still arguable within the language of liberal rights discourse: the figure was a refugee, the barrier was a specific policy failure, the injustice was legible. By 2026, that clarity has dissolved, and the paintings register this dissolution in their material condition.
The Flower as Updated Vanitas
The series maintains a conscious dialogue with the Dutch and Flemish still life tradition, unavoidable, given that Powell works in The Hague, in the country whose Golden Age produced the flower painting as a distinct genre precisely at the moment of its first commercial empire, and produced the vase itself as a fixture of that genre’s authority. But the relationship is adversarial. The classical vanitas painting memorialises individual mortality against a background of theological consolation: beauty perishes, as do we, but meaning persists, held in an arrangement, contained, composed. Powell strips out the consolation without stripping out the mortality, and strips out the container along with it.
Fear Not, I Have Ceased to Sing (2023) is the clearest statement of this revision. The flowers here are disarticulated, stems without soil, blooms hovering against black planes cut by geometric wedges of white and green. The title is a valediction, but not a defeated one: the singing has not been silenced by death, it has been set down deliberately. Quiet, here, is not surrender. It is the sound of something refusing to be used.
Novak observed, in 2013, that the flowers “seem to occupy a somewhat uncanny position in-between a decorative object to be aesthetically enjoyed and a subject potentially capable of interlocution.” That interlocution has become, in the decade since, less ambiguous in its address. The geometric interruptions in Fear Not, the white triangle, the green shape, are not backgrounds. They are structures, organising the flowers’ apparent freedom into something more like managed dispersal: controlled, geometric, administered. The comparison to the spatial logic of the free zone is not metaphorical but structural. The flowers occupy whatever gaps the geometry permits.
2023–2026: The Boundary Made Explicit
If the 2013–2023 period established the flower as witness within a space determined by others, the work made since has turned toward the mechanics of that determination itself. Where Refugees and Stock Still, Side by Side placed flowers against geometries that implied enclosure, the paintings of the past two years make the boundary the subject in its own right, no longer background architecture but the primary formal actor the flowers must negotiate.
The clearest device is a single diagonal, most often rendered in a hard, glassy teal or blue, cutting corner to corner across the canvas. It recurs with enough consistency across this period, But the needs the needs surely forever here, Ever changing aspects of the never changing life, A second for the mutterings, Hear these scraps and murmur them in the mud, that it functions less like a compositional device than a recurring legal fact. The line does not represent any single boundary. It represents boundary as such: the drawn edge that separates a zone of permitted growth from whatever lies past it, indifferent to what grows on either side. This is where the free zone research that has run alongside the paintings since 2018 enters the work most directly, not as illustration, but as structural logic. A special economic zone does not announce itself as a wall. It operates as a redrawn map, a line that changes what governs a piece of ground without changing how that ground appears. The paintings borrow exactly that quality: the diagonal looks decorative, almost architectural in the neutral sense, until you notice that everything on one side of it is answering to different conditions than everything on the other.
Several works from this period push the flowers into direct contest with that line rather than passive coexistence within it. In Saying again there is a last, wiry stems climb directly across a horizontal register that had separated sky from a weathered, fence-like ground, indifferent to the line’s authority. Where the 2013 work depicted persistence within a boundary, this newer group increasingly depicts persistence through and past one. The distinction matters: it marks a shift from documentation of confinement to something closer to insistence against it, though never with the confidence of guaranteed success.
A second development is the introduction of cellular structure into individual blooms, rings, membranes, nucleus-like cores appearing inside forms that still read, at a glance, as flowers. This began as an observation drawn from gathering reference images of plant, animal, and human cells and noticing the visual kinship between a cell under magnification and the circular, haloed bloom-forms already recurring in the paintings. Its effect on the work’s political register is not incidental. A cell does not announce whether it is ordinary tissue or the early stage of something pathological; that distinction only becomes legible with time and context. Rendering flowers with this ambiguity built into their structure extends the series’ long-standing refusal to let growth read as innocent. Growth, in a zone-governed landscape, is not self-evidently good. It can be extraction wearing the appearance of flourishing. The cellular flowers hold both readings simultaneously, refusing to resolve into either.
Material handling across this period has also shifted. Several 2026 canvases carry raw, unfinished canvas edges, torn or knotted rope-like borders, and shadow registers built from raw sienna, burnt umber, and sap green rather than the cooler palette of the earlier work. This is a conscious departure, the artist has described the period as one of deliberately testing an established vocabulary rather than repeating it, allowing improvisation, erasure, and re-composition to open the work rather than settle it. The result reads less like the clean emblematic clarity of 2013 and more like sediment: colour laid down, disturbed, partially reworked, and left visible in its reworking. Where the earlier paintings stated a condition, several of the recent ones seem to record the process of arriving at one, without fully closing that process off.
Collectivity, Individuality, and the Spatialisation of Beckett
A painting crowded with blooms and a painting holding a single flower are not simply different compositions. They are different subjects. The dense, unpunctuated fields of The old words back from the dead or Hear these scraps and murmur them in the mud depict the collective, many voices occupying the same ground, none of them legible alone, none of them silent either. The isolated bloom in Perhaps it is not mine at all, or the single resolved flower holding its shape against dissolution in Then at last before I fell, depicts the individual: singular, specific, and just as exposed to the same conditions the crowd is exposed to, only without the crowd’s cover.
What holds both registers together, and has held them together since the substitution of flower for figure in 2013, is something closer to a spatialisation of Beckett than a simple homage. It is not the titles alone, drawn as they are from his late prose, but the underlying method: the way Beckett’s characters endure through inner monologue rather than external resolution, the rituals they repeat because repetition is what continuance looks like when nothing else is available, the exact staging of where they are and how the light falls on them, the precise calibration of inner turmoil against outer circumstance. Beckett’s people are rarely told what world they are in. They inhabit it anyway, through habit, through voice, through the sheer persistence of going on. The paintings borrow that structure directly: flowers that do not know, and cannot ask, what has been decided about the ground they are rooted in, enduring it through repetition, through bloom, through the ritual of continuing to grow.
This is where the hope in the work actually lives, and it is worth saying plainly. At a moment when many people report exhaustion with democratic institutions that increasingly fail to represent them, this series does not offer reassurance that the structures holding flowers in place are benign, or that the zone, the boundary, the vitrine will loosen its terms. It offers something more durable than reassurance: witness to the fact that growth continues regardless, that the individual bloom still finds its own colour, that the collective field still murmurs even when no one in power is listening for it. That is not naivety. It is closer to what Beckett’s own characters model, endurance without guarantee, ritual without resolution, and it may be the most honest form hope can currently take.
Thirteen Years: What the Series Knows
This exhibition returns Powell’s flower paintings to Sabine Wachters Fine Arts, the same gallery where the series first appeared in 2013, under the title It is the month of May… for me. The return is not commemorative. It is a continuation under conditions that have moved considerably further in the direction the paintings already anticipated.
Read as a sequence, the works assembled here constitute a political phenomenology of the last decade. The flowers in 2013 occupy the threshold of the liveable. By 2023 they are dispersed across canvases that interrogate representation itself, its calibration, its geometry, the way it simultaneously shows and conceals. By 2026 they are embedded in matter that has become geological: the impasto not expressive but accumulative, registering time as deposit. The series has moved from the clarity of the emblematic to the opacity of the systemic.
What Swinkels identified in 2013 as the flower’s “sense of temporality”, living with the space, not in spite of it, has, across this span, accumulated a more precise political content. The series was never about nature. It was always about the conditions under which presence is permitted, registered, or erased, and about what remains when the vase that would once have made that presence safe to look at is no longer there to hold it. The flowers persist. Their persistence is not innocence. It is, under current conditions, the most available form of testimony.
The series will not resolve. It is not built for resolution. It is built, like the condition it describes, for continuation.
Note on the founding image: Many years ago Jean-Luc Godard described flowers growing at the periphery of highways as “roadside refugees.” In 2013 I began replacing human figures in my compositions with flowers and plants — a necessary move to reclaim a painterly space predominantly occupied, across centuries of representation, by the human figure. The urgency was both formal and political: the more pressing crises of climate breakdown, displacement, and survival demanded a different kind of protagonist, one that could carry the weight of the collective without resolving it into the individual, and the weight of the political without collapsing into illustration.
David Powell, The Hague, 2026
Zone Fever
Freeports, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Charter Cities are variations on private governance, they are states within states, designated areas of extraterritorial regions carved out from the host countries laws and protections. SEZs are a way for corporations working with governments to bypass regulations and ultimately exit the ‘oppressive constraints’ and interventions of ‘Big Government’.
Across the world the most lucrative line of business is in corporate governance, this occurs when venture capitalists, libertarians, and oligarchs seek to implement ‘exit’ strategies from democracy and social governance. F.D.Roosevelt made a request to the public upon his election to the US Presidency, he said “You elected me, now tell me what you want and I’ll do it” this gave rise to the New Deal in 1933, a Social Contract that saw egalitarian economics, GDP saw a fair balance between wage share and profit share, as a result public healthcare, and social services flourished for the next 30-40 years.
During the 1950’s numerous right wing libertarian economists and anarcho-capitalists such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, Antony Fisher, Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were incensed at FDR’S New Deal, which they saw as ‘theft of property’ which placed democratic constraints on individual liberty along with otherwise unfettered capital accumulation.
A wave of r/w libertarian think tanks were formed throughout the 1950s, such as The Insitute of Economic Affairs, The Adam Smith Institute, Mont Pelerin, The Heritage Foundation, The Tax Payer Alliances, and hundreds of others, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman advised their fellow libertarians to never disclose their partisan ideology to the public as it would entail losing their charity status, along with their plans to usurp social democracy which would horrify the public. In 1981 Antony Fisher, founder of the IEA London (1955) formed an umbrella group of ‘thinks tanks that create think tanks’, it was named the ATLAS network, it has since been referred to as the ‘network of liberty’. Think tanks operate as parties within parties, they enjoy charity status yet are funded by dark money from big oil/tobacco/agri/pharma and tech, much of their research is never disclosed to the public and consequently emerging government policies comprise deep austerity, anti-climate change, anti-LGBTQ+, culture wars and anti-governance tactics that erode public services with decades of defunding.
Citizens in so-called representative democracies around the world have been reduced to being mere spectators of their own fate as a new hybrid of right-wing libertarian and anarcho-capitalist set out to dismantle democracy and the welfare state by installing corporate governance in patchwork zones of private sovereignties isolated away from the interventions of Big Government.
Special Economic Zones have a long history dating back to Roman times, they are also known as colonialist projects (notably by the British)such as the East India Company 1600, through to colonization of Hong Kong and Singapore in the mid 1800s, known as China’s ‘century of humiliation’.
Peter Thiel (Palantir, PayPal and billionaire Trump donor) was inspired by William Rees-Moggs 1997 book ‘The Sovereign Individual – How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State’ which predicted the arrival of Big Tech as a new form of (Techno) Feudalism, Thiel recognised that fragmenting regions into privately run zones would birth a ‘thousand nation states’ in dynamic competition with each other setting their own private laws replacing what Tom Bell described as negatively framed ‘statist’ laws.
SEZs and charter cities are fenced-in regions, corporate owned enclaves of extraterritorial space with their own private laws, customers (not citizens) have a ‘choice’ to opt in or out by way of a contract. Post-Brexit UK is currently undergoing zone fever, this began as a Tory initiative between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss who are responsible for the current setting up of 12 deregulated Freeports and 74 SEZs. This is on the back of 192 English councils threatened with bankruptcy, while scores of business, agricultural, and residential properties are facing mass compulsory purchase orders.
Since 2016 my research into SEZs and the libertarian ideology behing them has seen me become a political activist with a sizable following on Twitter X. I’m taking part in public speaking events throughout the UK hosted by independent journalists, and concerned citizens who are asking question about SEZs, Freeports and Charter Cities. Brexit is a time-based project, the transition phase to full-blown corporate governance has already laid its foundations in the form of 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs, backed by Labour MPs, Mayors, councillors, Lords, and Baronesses who were board members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide SEZs/Freeports consortia.
Brexit has induced desperation by design, the UK is now ‘capital hungry’ and is letting go of democracy by allowing corporations to take up the mantle of governance where ‘democracy failed’. There is a concerted effort by the UK’s client Press to not report on what will become the biggest scandal of 21st century Britain. Brexit’s true purpose is to ensure capital accumulation is achieved as the public sector simultaneously atrophies through chronic underfunding, while the nation state’s laws and regulations are totally collapsed. Attacks on citizens’ protests will ramp up, targets will invariably be the ‘woke’ and LGBTQ+ communities, all those on the left, academics, writers, artists, intellectuals, and the independent press.
SEZs fragment local territories by ring-fencing them from the host country’s laws and protections. Collective sovereignty (people power) has been successfully targeted, sold off/commodified and is now being replaced with corporate sovereignty, and private governance.
Deregulated SEZs are primed to reconfigure each region of the UK by licensing the zones for 25 years, this is under ‘secondary legislation’ which emeans zero Parliamentary and public scrutiny. UK SEZs allow tax breaks to companies setting up inside them for 10 years.
It is no coincidence that Labour are members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide Freeports/SEZ consortia. Our main parties are quick to wave the glossy brochures of Freeports and SEZs replete with the usual ‘growth, innovation, and lifting deprived areas out of poverty’ ad nauseam, but the truth is countries with low taxation and rampant deregulation reveal high levels of crime, frozen wages for ordinary working people, huge increases in wages for the rich and absolute government corruption, and political instability.
My political activism into free zones comprises speaking at public events across the UK raising awareness about the dangers of free zones coming to communities and residents entrapped within them. The more I got involved with political activism, the more it fed into my studio practice, this has seen material outcomes in my work move away from display into creating ‘live environments’ that fuse together raw materials, works in progress, and completed works. This makes for a situation of ‘collective viewing’, rather than singular viewing, something I connected with when I visited Brancusi’s reconstructed studio outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2023. With a fresh interchangeability of materials, it became clearer to me that a broader painterly based approach was needed, this approach rapidly expanded across a diverse range of materials and outcomes. As Daniel Buren wrote in his 1971 paper The Function of the Studio, ‘the studio is the purest site of creation’, what happens after work ‘exits’ the studio remains to this day deeply problematic. These are my attempts at materializing conversations between my own research and activism via continually unfolding contemporary political events, I examine their histories, their inception, and sustained movement towards the dismantling of global democracy. I would qualify my recent production as a reclaiming of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ as something to trigger speculations on the past, present and future, of upcoming borders and limits on our democracies via zone fever.
David Powell, 2024
Band Paintings and Sculptures
The following text was written about about my work by Andrew Renton in 2019
It’s about a desire to possess things or capture them when you know the object of your gaze and desire cannot be grasped. It’s about fandom, which is an elevated form of identification, observation and even time travel.
These sources, collaged together like the back of your old school notebook insist that such imagery, in a digital age, is perpetually present, and belongs to all of us. A shared knowledge and collective ownership. And what does it mean to copy the already copied?
The artist can’t help his gaze. Not always a preliminary model towards a more fleshed out version, the drawing can also reclaim territory that has long been worked out, over-worked, even, and iconic. It rethinks its origins, putting the viewer back into the frame. It’s almost a readymade and comes with baggage. History brought into the present tense. It makes me think about what Kierkegaard said about repetition; that it was a kind of recollection forwards. And nothing less than an ethical engagement.
(And perhaps I should mention that the Fall are my favourite band of all time.) Andrew Renton 2019
– Since 2018 I’ve been making work about the British alternative music scene. Many of the bands I’m interested in were given a platform on John Peel’s radio show, if they got too famous he’d usually stop playing them, after all it was about giving exposure to unknown and new forms of music at the margins of the mainstream. My emotional connection with these bands began in my teens at a time when my only goals were to go to art school and see as many bands as possible.
Desire plays an enormous role in my work, years of going to concerts, feeling the build up of an electric atmosphere as I wait for the band to come on stage, the objects of my desire forever just out of reach. My identity was shaped by these experiences and unconventional sounds that flourished in the independent music scene . Art is a kind of time travel, fandom a perpetual state of collective identification and joy. At it’s core my work explores collective memory while embracing social dynamics that strives to bring different audiences together.
David Powell, 2024