Red Flower Head Girls - SET of 2

A set of two images 

This artwork is a digital download only no product will be sent to you.

Dimensions: each image is 3616x4800 300 ppi / 12" x 16"

Read the Terms of Use included in the download, it has much more information regarding use, requirements, and additional options.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The two images are said to be the same woman, seen before and after the forgetting.

Long ago, in a valley where the soil remembered every footstep, there lived a lineage of women called the Virelai—keepers of living memory. Each Virelai was bound to the land not by blood alone, but by a vow: to hold what the world could not bear to remember. Grief, names erased from history, promises broken quietly—these things were given to the earth, and the earth grew them into flowers that only the Virelai could carry.

The first image shows her at the moment of binding.
She is still turned outward, listening to the world. The blossoms and roots thread through her hair and throat, not as ornament but as conduits—memories entering her, delicate but relentless. Her expression is not sorrowful yet; it is resolute. She does not know what she will lose, only that she has agreed to lose it. The green behind her is the last season in which the land speaks gently.

The second image is what remains after decades of bearing.
She now faces the viewer, but her gaze no longer quite belongs to the present. The flowers have deepened in color, fed by what they were forced to hold. The vines etched into her skin are no longer reaching inward—they are trying to escape. The earth has grown heavy with remembrance, and she has begun to fracture under its weight. What she once carried for others has rewritten her body, her voice, her name.

There is a final secret whispered among the roots:
when a Virelai reaches this stage, she must choose—
to release the memories back into the world as a catastrophe,
or to let herself become soil, ending the line forever.

These images are believed to have been made just before the choice, when the land was holding its breath, and the flowers had not yet decided whether to bloom… or burn.