Molly M. Whawell – Live Art Commission

Introducing Molly M. Whawell, selected for the second year of our Live Art Commission. 

Molly is a Glasgow-based interdisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, sculpture and moving image. Blending investigative research with material enquiry, their work attends to the frictions between unruly, intimate and absurd forms of life and architectures of control.

Molly’s current research traces the global infrastructure of the cut-flower trade, anchored by the World Flower Auction at Royal FloraHolland, through which 43 million cut flowers are sold and distributed each day. It considers how the familiar gesture of gifting flowers transforms when traced to a macro-systems scale: to the global, financial and power-driven architectures of floricultural industries; the engineering of flowers for maximisation (of vase life, disease resistance and beauty); the clashing temporalities of flowers, workers and buyers purchasing for this or that occasion; and the artificial conditions and global cool-chain systems created in the race against the death of the flower.

From this research, Molly is developing a live performance alongside an artist moving-image work, with a first iteration of the performance to be shared at Market this August.