Cumulo Rosa "The Cloud Rose"
Cumulo Rosa is an invented Latin term meaning “Cloud Rose.” One summer afternoon the plumes of roses at the Lyndale Rose Garden in Minneapolis looked to me just like the billowing clouds gathering over the nearby lake. The Latin word cumulus means “to heap,” “to accumulate,” “to gather into a pile.” This term could apply to roses, clouds, or even collages. Cumulus implies an ever-growing, ever-changing structure: the roses in the garden reaching skyward on their sturdy stems respond to the slightest shift in light or moisture with subtle changes in color. Roses hover between earth and sky.
Cumulo Rosa “the cloud rose” is an invention, like all descriptions of the natural world, based partially on observation and partially on imagination. This exhibition is not about a particular species of Rose, but what is unknown, leaving space for the imagination and focusing attention onto what assumptions we project onto the rose, rather than its description. A rose could be described as being at “peak bloom,” but that is an aesthetic judgment that varies based on the viewer and also requires prediction of the future, the weather and the effects of time. Who can really know when that peak will be? What day? What hour is the bloom at its fullest? Who will be present to mark that one moment?
This work was exhibited at The Soeffker Gallery at Hamline University in February and March 2026. The gallery lies at the heart of the Twin Cities in the Midway Neighborhood. Our city was flooded with feelings of sadness and uncertainty. I installed this work in the gallery in an effort to inspire our city to carry on and provide hope for the future, spring would come, ice would melt.