Show Dates: 17th March – 9th April 2022

Opening on the 23rd of March 6-8pm

Artist Statement:

A first-generation Australian, Lirosi is the daughter of Italian immigrants. A regular outing with Lirosi’s mother and grandmother involved visiting the graves of deceased family members at Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne. During these excursions she would encounter huge bouquets of artificial flowers embellishing most of the graves in the Southern European section of the cemetery. She thought it absurd and ironic that the ‘forever’ flowers dared to defy death.

More recently, she has spent a lot of time walking her dogs through the Melbourne General Cemetery situated close to her home. This time she noticed the abundance of ‘lost’ artificial flowers blown by the wind, belonging to nobody. And so, she started to collect them.

Irvin D. Yalom suggests that we die twice. “Someday soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory”1. Lirosi says ‘There is a beauty in the fragile, patina of these flowers that for me reveals the story of time and possibly exposes the extent to which other’s memories of the deceased have also faded. For me, these flowers denote acts of remembering, life’s transience and the stories that bind us all.’

Sarina Lirosi is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the relationship between memory, loss, and desire. She completed a Bachelor of Education in Visual Arts from Melbourne University and a \ Master of Fine Art from RMIT University. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including a work development grant from the Australia Council. Sarina has had numerous solo exhibitions and has also participated in many group and curated exhibitions including Celebrating the Exquisite Corpse, at the Bendigo Art Gallery; Fictions, at Gippsland Centre for Art & Design presented by Monash University Museum of Art; and Lost & Found at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne.

She has been a finalist in many national award exhibitions in Australia, including the Hutchins Art Prize, Hobart, National Works on Paper at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and, more recently, a finalist in the 2021 Olive Cotton Portrait Award.

1. Irvin D. Yalom: Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Basic Books, 2012