POISONED GRACE

In Poisoned Grace, John Black explores the paradox of beauty and mortality through the image of a skull entwined with the red spider lily — a flower both exquisite and lethal. Traditionally associated with death and the afterlife in Eastern symbolism, the lily becomes a metaphor for the seductive danger of what ultimately destroys us. The skull, rendered in silver leaf, gleams beneath layers of transparent and red acrylic, their laser-engraved patterns recalling both digital code and sacred ornament. This interplay of material and meaning heightens the sense of tension: attraction and repulsion, life and decay, allure and annihilation. Black’s work invites contemplation of our fatal intimacy with beauty — how the very things that fascinate us can also be our undoing.