The evolutionary origin of flowers are shrouded in mystery. In a process of attempting to understand evolutionary beginnings and mark the passage of vast expanses of time, I became interested in a particular story of origination. This work charts the first flowers among the history of Earth’s evolution.

Flowers are the sexual organs of more than 360,000 species of plants alive today, all derived from a single common ancestor in the distant past. This ancestral plant, alive sometime between 250m and 140m years ago, and marked on the timeline in the work, produced the first flowers when the planet was warmer, richer in oxygen and greenhouse gases than today, when dinosaurs dwelt in primeval landscapes. The first flowers left no traces. The too-fragile structures left no fossils. Recently botanists achieved the best reconstruction to date of this ancestral flower, resembling a modern magnolia. It is still unknown how that flower came to be.

The origins of the first flowers have been another way to investigate how it all came to be: how rocks and dust turned into stars, then planets, then mysteriously into flowers, and then us, and how it will all return to rock and cosmic dust. Here, I’ve re-created the magnolia-like shapes of the first flowers as I imagined them to be, overlaid with an accurate star-chart and the checkerboard pattern I often associate with mathematical diagrams showing the curvature of space-time. The language of lines and dots are reminiscent of dust and the astronomical maps that connect specific locations in time and space.

The flowers struck me as particularly symbolic as a way of visualizing our evolution. From new life to death, from purity to female sexual power, the first flowers conjure many meanings in the story of evolution…swelling from tender bud to full bloom, I associate them with creation, new beginnings, fertility as well as birth or rebirth, and the way they wilt and die with fragility, with a swift passage from life into death.

Recognizing the double symbolism as emblems of both life and death, I continue to think of our place in the history of everything that ever existed, and try to follow the path of dust particles across the evolution of the universe, following these small specks, to find meaning in their passage and transformation, looking to untangle the mystery of how nothing can turn into something.