Jim Hodges’ A Diary of Flowers

The pages of Jim Hodges’ A Diary of Flowers are but flimsy tissue, smudged with inky images of petals in ballpoint black and Biro blue. Comprising a total of 565 finely wrought doodles on cheap restaurant napkins, this early work by the American artist dates from 1994 and was created over a period of three years. Pinned gently to the gallery wall, these trembling sheets are a catalogue of fleeting moments, testament, we might suppose, to coffee shop daydreaming or time filled while waiting for friends or lovers.

The ephemeral delicacy of A Diary of Flowers, the sense that it could simply dissolve or flutter out of existence, is typical of Hodges. He came of age as an artist in the early 1990s at the height of the AIDS crisis and the devastation it brought to the gay community, and his art underscores the sense that life, beauty and love are as transitory as they are precious. At the same time, he suggests that the complex networks from which relationships are spun can be both fragile and restrictive, a point succinctly made by his little drawing, Chained, where the word “LOVE” is spelt out in chains and coated in cobwebs.

Flowers, tokens of both romance and death, are a recurring motif. Elsewhere he has strung indestructible silk blooms into streamers, or fixed them to walls to create poignant, sweetly kitschy works like Changing Things, which seems partly a momento mori, and partly a defiant freezing of time. Similarly frail objects of everyday beauty such as spiders’ webs have been realised as silver chains, while disposable newsprint is decked in gold leaf.

Hodges’ work confronts us with everyday epiphanies, the revelation that ordinary things have the potential to induce a state of rapture.

A Diary of Flowers and Changing Things are currently on show within Jim Hodges’ exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, London until 5 September.