Daisy Dreams

See the original article at Conversation Piece; Place in Time, Daisy Dreams



Words by Mark Beldan

The journey that Mark Beldan and his cardboard meadow of daisies went on was by pure chance circular; beginning with exhibition ‘Regular Nature’ at gallery Window 135 New Cross, and returning with his show ‘Loverose Way’ in 2025, accompanied at each stage by photographic documentation.

This process began earlier, in autumn 2022 at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, Toronto and was punctuated along the way by dance performances by Corali Dance Company.



The title of the show came from returning to a familiar place after a time away.



I was back in Toronto for three months, the longest I’ve been back to Canada since moving away. While working I noticed asters – asters everywhere. The timing of the flowers tracked almost exactly with my time there, appearing in late summer and turning to seed heads around November.





We fell in love with Marks description of painting the flowers with Claudine Longet's 'Love is Blue' playing in the background... and the dreamlike space that was created at their meeting point.
We asked Mark to consider scaling up his flowers to become a dance set. - Corali Dance Company



Despite how graphic and cartoonish the flowers are, they're always specific.
I started out with lots and lots of photos of flowers, and would try to depict a specific flower each time I made a cutout.
So none of them are symmetrical or perfect.





Loverose Way seems to have become an online map placeholder for streets or roads that don’t have a name. Much as lorem ipsum is used by typesetters, and Alan Smithee once directed every disowned film project.



There's something quite 1960's about the big flowers, but I can't decide whether they would have existed in a London Arts Lab or on a French pop music programme.



The dancers created ever evolving movement, toying with sentimentality, joyful and absurd. - Corali Dance Company



A vision of what our world could look like imagined by the dancers. - Corali Dance Company







With Corali, we were making 'Daisy Dreams' in the very centre of London.
'Loverose Way' became another imaginary flowery path running through the neighbourhood.