Darkness & Light – Ritual and Symbolism in Art from Victorian to Modern Times

Image: Headstone for Violet Langley, Image from the St Thomas’ Cemetery Headstones Index Collection, Heritage Centre, Stanton Library.

Explore the floral symbolism on monuments in St Thomas’ Rest Park, the first European burial ground on the north shore, as well as more modern depictions of life and death, in this art class with Sandy Shilansky, Stanton Library’s resident artist.

Pervading gloom and grand-scale mourning epitomised death practices in the Victorian era, particularly after 1861 in Great Britain when the widowed Queen Victoria took grieving to the extreme.  It was during her reign that flowers became more than just objects of admiration and ritual, but a means of communicating cryptic messages through their very own language.