Rogue Blossoms

The journey of the collaborative process according to Hoch+Green has been both exhilarating and liberating.

A friendship spanning over 20 years between friends Julie Green and Gina Hochstein, percolated into a wonderful creative collaboration. Both join the collaboration with similar creative aesthetic, but with differing skills.

This originative duo challenges the viewer’s perception of the humdrum of the everyday. As mums they struggle with the day to day conflict which our lifestyle on this planet brings, and wrestle with what the future holds for our children. Highlighting how lucky we are to be living in New Zealand, they celebrate by looking at the beauty in the small and ordinary but highlight the dangers to our existence too.

Rogue Blossoms, A Floral Encounter:
Over the decades our approach to and meaning of flowers has changed. Historically painters selected flowers to convey special messages about their sitters and provide context to their works.

Contemporaneously we have lost much of the symbolism associated with flowers, especially given the availability of flowers all year round, we are able to purchase our favourite blooms when ever we want. Selection of these flowers tends to be based predominantly on the beauty of the bloom rather than the meaning of the flower, the scent or sentiment.

In Hoch+Green’s Rogue Blossom series, they have chosen to revert to this traditional practice, choosing to use flora to characterise the personalities of their sitters, providing the viewer with insights and prompts into these individual’s attributes and perhaps the eras they are influenced by.

In these human miniature gardens, the sitter’s personality is demonstrated with layers of blooms, leaves and floral spikes – sometimes in the peak of their beauty, through to the dried and sometimes withered form, they demonstrate the wonderful assortment of personality traits providing insights into our sitters.

A further layer to each garden arrangement features human introduced architectural characteristics which further define the individuals, and a final layer of character of a hand illustrated wallpaper.

Each human garden blossoming in their own personalised way.

It’s on this basis that Hoch+Green have created their studies of Rogue Blossoms. Portraits of extraordinary flora and fauna in their human garden.