signed and dated 2002 lower right; titled and dated on a label on the reverse
20.5 × 30 in (52.1 × 76.2 cm) (sheet)
(including Buyer's Premium)
Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton
Hodgins, auction, Calgary, 25 February 2025, lot 52
Private Collection, Toronto
Mireille Eagan, Sarah Fillmore, Sarah Milroy, Catharine Mastin, and Caroline Stone, Mary Pratt, Fredericton, 2013, page 23
Mary Pratt's sustained engagement with the still life genre was a central and defining thread throughout her artistic practice. Here she found her primary method of investigating and interrogating the overlooked beauty of her surroundings. As Pratt describes, “the ability to find intensity in other things, the apparently inanimate… It serves me well. It allows me solitary moments of intense bliss. It asks nothing and gives everything.” From illuminated jars of jelly to carefully arranged dinner tables, Pratt captures still lifes as moments suspended outside of time. They neither decay nor do they progress. Rather, they are in a state of quiet permanence.
In Amaryllis Flower with Two Stone Birds, a luminous bloom occupies the centre, floating in water and seemingly resistant to time. The glass vessel remains perpetually clear, catching and reflecting light onto the surface below. Each element of this still life is rendered in a state of perfect stillness.
This work marks the third appearance of bird sculptures in Pratt’s still life practice. In 2002, the same pair appears in both an oil painting and a print. By revisiting familiar objects, Pratt constructs new visual arrangements to generate distinct effects. In Amaryllis Flower with Two Stone Birds, the flower asserts a compositional dominance, while the stone birds recede into the background, quietly supporting the scene.
