Sea Holly, Blackpill 2024

Blackpill’s sea holly grows in the sand just above the tideline, its metallic foliage deflecting glare and salt. That adaptive sheen finds a formal analogue in the colour harmonies Arthur Wesley Dow commended—soft oppositions of cool and warm, punctuated by linear accents. Likewise, the veined woodgrain left visible in the block recalls Joichi  Hoshi’s prints, where the substrate itself signals time and weathering. The print links Japanese print modernism to Gower’s ecology, translating a hardy littoral survivor into a crisp, stark emblem.

Silver‑blue bracts radiate from each umbellifer like starbursts, their serrated edges set off by lean, purplish stalks that tilt across the picture plane. Against the warm sand backround the forms read as both botanical fact and graphic abstraction, the plant’s natural armature reduced to alternating flats of slate, olive and straw. The restrained palette lets the spiny geometry do the talking: a study in repetition, tension and coastal light.