'Rhodroponicum' by Melanie Carvalho
This audio clip describes the artwork Rhodroponicum by Melanie Carvalho (b.1969).
It has been created for use as part of our primary school resource, The Superpower of Looking, in order to support pupils with blindness or visual impairment to take part in the lessons.
Explore the painting further in our resource, A landscape of the imagination in collage.
Full audio description text
This is a painting of a modern, white-walled room with two clouded windows, partly open. But, where the carpet might be, the artist Melanie Carvalho has created an imaginary landscape by sticking lots of overlapping pictures cut from postcards and magazines. Set against a low range of dusky pink mountains painted at the base of the walls, on the shores of what could be a lake of choppy water, the cut-out pictures are not to scale and are of all different sizes. They show tiny elephants standing in a pool partly hidden by huge dark fir trees.
There’s also a wooden signpost, a greenhouse, a bandstand and lots and lots of big flowers with large petals, called rhododendrons. These trumpet-like blooms are mostly white but some are flushed with vivid pink or have long, pink, curling stalks, known as stamens, protruding where the petals fold back as though the flowers are sticking their tongues out. The flowers climb the walls of the room and spill over the edges of the paper onto the creamy white backing board which is just over 150 cm high and 120cm wide. The flowers fill the right-hand side of the image and, about three-quarters of the way up, a little blue bird, perhaps a hummingbird, perches on a branch pecking at a seed head.
Above the bird, on the room’s white wall, is a blue label removed from a water bottle, showing snowy mountain peaks. The walls seem to meet towards the left of the image. High up here, under another spray of flowers is a white plate painted with blue flowers. The overall effect is lush and exotic, as the flowers try to escape the confines of this conventional room and take us to faraway places.
