Dishonesty, Spring 2026

Dried Honesty or Lunaria seedpods handsewn together with chain stitch together with discarded paint strips, wallpaper swatches, practice pieces of Suminagashi marbling, foil, gold wrapping paper, magazine strips, bubblewrap, pill blister packs, kozo paper, glitter card.

760*600mm

What makes something organic? natural? manmade? What happens if we slip a few inorganic materials? Is the overall effect still organic? Even if the form and some of the materials is/are manmade?

Often dismissed as a craft item, lunaria (common name = honesty) once ubiquitous is now seldom found in the wild.  This piece began as an exploration of the theme of time.  I chose chain stitch to echo and repeat the form of the lunaria seedpods.  I began with the idea of ‘once in a blue moon’ (lunaria = of moon derivation and some of the seedpods being blue in colour), occasionally replacing the lunaria with a blue painted template of the seedpod.  With the hand-sewing being quite time intensive, I quickly found that substituting the honesty with ‘imposter’ pieces kept my interest.  As the days wore on, I substituted more and more, seeing how far from the natural look I could get without veering too far from the overall look itself.  This also tied in with the seedpods’ other name ‘honesty’ and the initial dishonesty I had with myself over the attention it would take to continue with a somewhat arduous and, if I’m honest, tedious task.

Image of Green Honesty

Its sister piece Honesty is born of the same process but uses Honesty that was dried when it was still green. This is a play on the nature of honesty – how it is sometimes considered naive and therefore green or of youth.