Transpiration (2014)

"Carr revels in offering the viewer the iconic and the imperceptible, the instant gratification and the longue durée, so things are not how they first appear. In Transpiration, these luscious images eventually reveal movement, a glimpse of a petal folding or fluttering, and the carnations’ colours change, too, each pink, yellow, and blue slowly deepening. Carr has filmed a classroom science experiment with a time-lapse camera: Place a white carnation into dyed water, and the flower absorbs the water through its stem, adopting its dyed colour in the process. The work’s points of reference are as avant-garde as they are populist: for instance, Warhol’s flower paintings that were in turn inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1959 film Testament of Orpheus (thus Carr returns the flower imagery to its cinematic roots)."