The Ether Iris Project is the first collection in our Crypto Curiosity Closet. The photographs capture flowers from my mother’s massive collection, gathered from shops and catalogues but mostly from friends, family, and acquaintances who connect through an appreciation of a particular burgundy pattern, grape Kool-Aid smell, dewy glisten, or inherited name such as Dark Mystery,  Stepping Out, Exotic Star, or Immortality. As the plants and flowers come back, year after year, even if you don’t care to remember Rare Edition, his purple and white pattern and delicate speckle start to feel familiar. Before you know it, you’re greeting him every season and sending regards to your mother, because of course, he came from her. 

My mother and her iris friends meet in their long-sleeved work shirts and brimmed hats, in sunny spots of shady yards and in the rolling grass outside nursing home windows where they move their bodies through the dirt, gently pulling apart rhizomes, replanting them, and multiplying these extensions of themselves into the world. They hand the extra rhizomes to friends who remember them when the flowers bloom big and beautiful in the spring. When grandfathers, mothers and friends die, the flowers move on to other spaces but they hold on to those faces. Each flower has roots to the people who admired and cultivated them in the past and when they come up, so do the faces of those people, no matter if they are living or dead.

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Find your grandfather or mother here and hold onto the memory. Consider its immortal value. In our cyber community, seemingly so far from the dirt, we'll consider how to distribute that value into the land that holds our descendance.