"Bloom"(2003) - Anna Schuleit

After talking about Ai Weiwei during class, I came across the artist Anna Schuleit. Her installation “Bloom” (2003) in particular caught my attention because it reminded me aesthetically of Ai Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds”. In this installation, she filled a closing mental health hospital with 28,000 flowers.  The flowers were sorted by color and placed throughout the four levels of the hospital. Anna also used the old public announcement system to play the recordings of the ambient sounds of the hospital leading up to its day of closing.  From 2001-2004 Anna worked as a visiting artist at a psychiatric institution in Massachusetts. Her installation “Bloom” was created to address the “persistent absence of flowers in psychiatric hospitals settings”. 

http://annaschuleit.com/bloom.html