Last October, 2019, I was lucky enough to have Venezuela Blackshear fly up to New York from Tennesse to help me out on a very special video for ÆSTHESIA. Vene and I have been creative collaborators since 2015 when I first dived into fine art photography with the series Mermaid Food. In fact, she found me on Instagram while she was living in Orlando, FL, and flew up to work with me then too, birthing a beautiful new long-term friendship and partnership.
Over the years Venezuela and I have grown to become confidants and support systems for each other. The Sunflower is a flower that is very special to her, one so special that she got a small one tattooed right below her eye.
With this fact, naturally she needed to be the one to help me film it. We spoke and researched for many months on all the ways that the Sunflower is used for health benefits, nutritional value, and as a soil cleanser.
Below are some fun facts about Sunflowers along with a behind the scenes look at how we filmed and recorded it’s vibrations. Full film coming this Spring!
Sunflower Facts:
Domesticated 5,000 years ago sunflowers now grow across 63 million acres in 70 countries
The sunflower is native to the America's and was used extensively by Native American Indians for food, as oil, in bread, medical ointments, dyes and body paints.
Sunflowers can be used to extract toxin such as lead, arsenic and uranium from contaminated soil. They have been used to pull radioactive contaminants out of the soil such as back in the mid-1990s near the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. Researchers cleaning up the Fukushima site in Japan are now putting the flowers to the test.
Sunflowers oily seeds are rich in protein, fat, and linoleic acid (an important omega-6 fatty acid
You can eat almost the entire sunflower plant and you can enjoy this nutritious food in all its stages of life: from supple seedling to mature and dry. Eat the leaves of older plants alone or in a salad. Pick the flowers when they are in the bud stage. The buds taste similar to artichokes. Sunflower stalks -- which taste similar to celery -- provide a crunchy texture to salads.
Modern varieties of sunflowers have been created using genes from crop wild relatives to endow traits such as salt tolerance, healthier oil, and resistance to pests and diseases.
The sunflower is a large inflorescence, this means the flower head is actually made of many tiny flowers called florets. Central florets look like the center of a normal flower while the outer florets look like yellow petals and together they make up a "false flower".
The flowers within a sunflower head are clustered in a spiral pattern whereby each floret is oriented towards the next by the golden angle of 137.5°. This produces a pattern of interconnecting spirals. The number of left and right spirals are consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Normally there are 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in the other. Very large sunflowers can have 89 in one direction and 144 in the other.
Final image of Sunflower for ÆSTHESIA
“The sunflower on my skin represents presence yet seclusion. Presence as in-regardless of anything that our world could manifest, the sun always remains even if we cannot see it. Seclusion as in-regardless of what’s around me, the opportunity to bloom creatively yet sporadically as the uplifting Sun Flower will always be. Eye had known for a year prior to receiving the sunflower face tattoo that that was exactly what eye desired. Eye remember expressing that if eye had cried at any point after getting the tattoo, that eye would be crying for a life alive in a blooming world. It is still a magic to me, like a talisman or vigil almost. Words for sunflower spirituality would be adoration, loyalty, longevity, faith-happy flowers, sun gazing. Eye am those and of those actions and more. It’s the tuning of my physical frequency.”
- Venezuela Blackshear
Top Row: Behind the scene’s filming Sunflowers with Venezuela as color stylist | Bottom Row: Behind the scene’s recording Sunflowers with ALURIA (Juan Correa Lopez) in his studio with a Midi Sprout
Live streaming of the Sunflower with the Midi Sprout by ALURIA (Juan Correa Lopez)