Pushpa By Rotem, Ornan

This book is a photographic essay in which classical Indian and Southeast Asian sculptures originating in the first millennium CE are juxtaposed with photographs of cut flowers. The two inhabit very different domains: the flowers are natural organic forms while the sculptures are stone man-made artifices; the flowers are alive, of the moment, their life span measured in days, whilst the sculptures are very much of the past, inanimate, frozen hundreds of years ago. The flowers display themselves in colourful exuberance while the sculptures, as we have them, are stolidly monochromatic.