The Language of Flowers Meets Queer Desire in Kris Knight's Tender Portraiture

"In late 19th-century London, the famed writer and ostentatious dandy Oscar Wilde initiated a trend that, as trends often do, flourished into a life of its own. Wilde wore a green carnation-the typically pink petals were dyed with arsenic-to the theater, prompting questions about what the oddly colored boutonniere symbolized. This was the height of floriology in Victorian England, when various blooms were utilized to convey covert meanings, and the green carnation was an addition to this practice."

"As Tara Isabella Burton writes, Wilde's sartorial choice ultimately led to his downfall, after a novel called The Green Carnation, based on one of his relationships with another man, was used as evidence in his trial for "gross indecency." (It should be noted that Wilde didn't write this novel.) The flower quickly implanted itself in the collective psyche as a symbol of queer sexuality."

""The Victorian era was very repressed and proper; the fad of floriography was a way that people, especially young people, could express secret desires and sentiments by selecting flowers to give each other," he says, noting that most blooms had double meanings. "Although queer people were still very much in the shadows, and still illegal, this period of time made some progress with regarding gay people as human beings."

Oscar Wilde popularized the green carnation in late 19th-century London by wearing a dyed flower as a theatrical accessory, linking it to coded floriography. A novel titled The Green Carnation, based on one of his same-sex relationships, was used as evidence in his trial for "gross indecency," and the bloom became associated with queer sexuality. Canadian artist Kris Knight creates oil-pastel portraits paired with floral still lifes that draw from Victorian floriology and social repression. Knight's earlier series addressed 19th-century pandemics and sea-based cures. The Victorian practice of assigning double meanings to flowers allowed discreet expressions of desire amid legal and social constraints.

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