BRAIN FLOWERS, 2014 - Present

Katherine Sherwood's Brain Flowers series (2014-24) reimagines Italian and Northern Renaissance vanitas still-life painting in light of her own experience with disability. Drawing inspiration from the spiritual and botanical interests of seventeenth-century women painters, Sherwood paints on the well-worn reverse sides of found art historical prints and substitutes blooming flowers with MRI images of her own brain, challenging the received art historical canon.

As Sherwood explains, vanitas painting is:

“a rich symbolic language that addresses the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures. In this work, dying flowers represent the brevity of life. Sunflowers signify turning your face toward God, insects that crawl on the earth denote evil, and butterflies represent redemption….

"I used to think my use of brain-related imagery was an indicator of joyous life, but as time passes, I see it as a representation of life and death. The brain can be seen in parallel to Van Gogh’s dying flowers; they do not represent death itself but rather the transience of existence."

– Katherine Sherwood, Garden of the Yelling Clinic (catalog), 2022

In the Brain Flowers series, the collaged medical imagery is intertwined with effusively painted flowers, merging historical depictions of beauty with life-saving modern scientific techniques to highlight the fragility and resilience of existence. These paintings call attention to suppressed histories of women artists and reclaim space for disabled bodies, pushing the boundaries of how we understand and represent the human experience.