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Flowers of invention

The Flowers of Invention (2025) are a stand-alone set of interactive electronic illuminated sculptures designed for festivals. Their debut at Scarboro Bowl integrated them into a Meow Wolf-style interpretive world which included interactive exhibits, videos, and stage design. Built around the concept that these cosmic-earthly hybrid flowers metabolize the universe's dark matter, rather than sunlight (in a process called obscurasynthesis), the Flowers invited festivalgoers to talk, make music, and move around them in order to see how they react.

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The sculptures make use of individually addressable LED components, sensors, controllers, and a wide variety of iridescent and translucent materials ranging from ping pong balls to epoxy resin. Biologist, artistic collaborator and festival producer Loren Walker named each flower according to Linnean biological naming conventions. 

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The Flowers also survived a cataclysmic 20 hour rain event on the Saturday of the festival which shorted out power and forced us to move the musicians underneath our tent. 

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The Flowers of Invention are available to rent or purchase for events, festivals, and installations. Sound-reactive and other sensory inputs can be calibrated to your setting. Email tenderfirestudio@gmail.com to request a quote.

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Tender Fire Studio is part concept, part my tiny basement apartment full of art supplies and very little furniture, and part shared workshop. I work, play, and love on land that was stolen from the Pocumtuc people, settled by colonizers, and continues to be sold for profit in the speculative real estate market for the enrichment and comfort of the owning class. Decolonizing my practice is an ongoing study of how I can be in right relationship to the land, animals, and plants of this place while embracing and acknowledging the often-scary precarity and vulnerability of a life given to the pursuit of soul and the sacred rather than the settler concepts of security and safety. I give thanks and praise to the rivers that form this Connecticut River valley, to these sand hills and the ants that dwell here and find my kitchen window so inviting, to the many birds and their dawn hymns, and to the forests: o the trees, the ferns, the damp stones and the deep deep woods, you are the mercy of the sacred in cellulose flesh.


Tender Fire Studio  @tenderfirestudio
tenderfirestudio@gmail.com
PO BOX 9359, North Amherst, MA 01059

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