FLORAL DOME by Petah Coyne

Petah Coyne, Untitled (The Woman in the Dunes), 2023. Specially-formulated wax, silk flowers, pigment, ribbon, wire, silk/rayon velvet, cotton archival fabric, pearl-headed hat pins, tear-headed hat pins, thread, foam, glass vitrine. Picture: J J Scott.

New York artist Petah Coyne is known for creating sculptures that show a Baroque sensibility, occupying a space between the beautiful and the grotesque. In Untitled #1567 (The Woman in the Dunes), recently shown on the group exhibition titled SUMMER READS at Galerie Le Long in Chelsea, Coyne’s memorial dome can be read as a vessel of desire and loss, preserving the floral signifier while deferring its decay. The artist conjures a funerary poetics that is both lush and elegiac, staging waxen blooms within a glass vitrine that recalls Victorian mourning domes and reliquary traditions. The work’s material excess—velvet, pearl pins, archival fabric—echoes the ornamental grief of a bygone era, while the sealed enclosure gestures toward containment, preservation, and the deferred decay of memory. Coyne’s assemblage is haunted by absence: the flowers, embalmed in wax and glass, become spectral signifiers of longing, suspended between life and loss. In this context, the vitrine is not merely a display device but a subliminal threshold—a Lacanian objet a of mourning—where desire clings to the trace of what cannot be touched.

Johannes Scott, August 2025.