Paper Doll Poems

Over the last few years I have also been working ambitiously on a body of “paper doll poems”, combining my interests in the traditions of folk poetry/limericks, butterfly collections, emoji chains and pictographic/hieroglyphic languages.  These collaged pictographic poems have evolved over the past two years to explore symmetry in palindromic language, incorporating many precepts of floriography––the cryptological system of communication through the exchange of bouquets of flowers. I’m particularly interested in the floriography which flourished in the 19^th-century, when floral arrangements permitted the sender to express feelings which were forbidden to be spoken aloud in Victorian society.