Exhibition // Hilla Kurki – Almost All the Flowers in My Mother’s Garden

In her project “Almost All the Flowers in my Mother’s Garden” (Khaos Publishing), Hilla Kurki literally explores her mother’s garden to photograph her beloved flowers. Flowers are her mother’s passion and she “grows” them as she “grew” her daughters. In Finnish the same verb can be used for implying “to grow” or “to raise”; you don’t raise daughters, you grow them. In a way, the flowers her mother has planted, grown, and cared for start to symbolize the daughters, each being beautiful, individual living creatures.

In this project Kurki is exploring relationships between mothers and their daughters because she realised with people her age that they had a lot in common, at least more than what she would have thought. Her series was published in a book in 2022 and accompanied by texts created from various intimate memories collected from anonymous daughters. Every daughter can recognize part of her histories in some of those texts. The flowers in the pictures symbolize the care, or the lack of it, that forms the basis of our growth.