Exhibition Dahlias, Et cætera
Head to Flamanville Castle to discover its magnificent park, its ponds, the Dahlias garden and its cultural activities. Flamanville has the largest collection of dahlias in Europe, with more than 1000 varieties. Taking as its starting point the territory of the garden, the Centre photographique Rouen Normandie has designed an exhibition associating four photographers gathered around the flower. The invitation was first extended to Marion Maimon, a French photographer, to document the different varieties present in the conservatory garden during the last flowering in autumn 2021. In residence in Flamanville, she walked through the garden and created a gallery of portraits of dahlias, «posing» in front of the landscape elements of the coast: sky, water, rock. She is joined here by three photographers who have each recently developed a personal work on the flower. The Dutch photographer Popel Coumou deploys scholarly architectures of colored papers and modelling clay flowers oscillating between naiveté and precision. Hubert Crabières, French photographer, portrait the artificial flower, between pretentious realism and fantasy temptation when Jason Evans, English photographer, actor of the community garden The Garden Gate Project located in Margate (Kent), made of still life and floral composition, the place of social bond. Punctuating these contemporary works, a selection of amateur films from the collections of Normandy Images, evokes the manufacture and practice of Norman flowering corsos.