The Last Bloom: Vicki Lee - Harper's BAZAAR December 2021

Artist VICKI LEE and her photographer husband, TED O’DONNELL, began their signature floral series on their first date 10 years ago. A new book, ASPHYXIATE, is their farewell to flowers as they embark on new creative ventures

The same week Vicki Lee explains her floral series, the decade-long photographic collaboration with her husband, Ted O’Donnell, is coming to an end, the couple also celebrated their 10th anniversary and O’Donnell’s 40th birthday. Milestone upon milestone is heaped upon them: chapters ending, new pages turning, doors closing, windows opening. So what’s one more?

She can’t explain why the series, which gained her an international cult following, must end, other than it’s a “gut feeling”. “I think everyone’s had those relationships or things in their life that have just run their course,” she says. “I have a habit of wanting to leave things when they are doing well and when they’re at their peak beauty.”

After all, all good things must come to an end. Better to be ashes than dust. When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off. “It’s more of a statement for myself as an artist — it’s better to finish it than keep pumping out something I know I can sell without the integrity behind the work,” she adds. “If anything, it’s probably the strongest respect I can give to true art; not even my own. It’s time to move on.”

To mark the occasion, Lee and O’Donnell have compiled photographs into a book titled Asphyxiate. The pages are filled with the signature paint-and-flower artworks they’ve become known and loved for since they first collaborated on their first date. As the story goes, Lee and O’Donnell had been on a sunset picnic, and snatched some Gymea lilies from the street. They spent the rest of the evening drenching them in tahini and honey and taking photos. “It sounds like a perfect PR story, but it’s the truth,” Lee says, laughing.

As the years went on, their artmaking expanded into several iterations of the original flower photograph. Large-scale closeups of flowers dripping with thick paint, or enveloped by billowing clouds of paint reminiscent of dipping a used brush into clean water, or lit to capture ominous blacks and electric blues. The photographs are of flowers, yes, but they are also of much more than that: they’re chaotic and quiet, rhythmic and still, representative of a lust for life and love of creative expression. Lee’s relationship with the series has been so all-consuming that she named it Rose.

For Lee and O’Donnell personally, the florals also represent moments in their lives: their first date being an obvious one, as well as the birth of their children, Yokie and Opia, and other smaller moments. “I didn’t expect making the book to be so emotional,” Lee says. “When you’re the one making the decision [to end something], you’re putting yourself in that emotional place. When I looked back on the history of the work, it’s so interlinked with my relationship with Ted and the kids. Some of the series were based on certain moments of our lives and are representative of that time. It’s been intense — it’s like looking at a photo album of the past 10 years and then having to edit it down to the ones we want to include.”

The works in the book are mostly unseen images as well as slightly altered versions of the prints for sale on Lee’s website and in her Sydney gallery. Lee teamed up with creative director Christopher Holt to design the book. “I sent him this song called ‘The Earth Prelude’ by Ludovico Einaudi, and said, ‘I want the book to play out like this song,’ and he just got it. The progression of the book is essentially birth, a climax and death — but death in a beautiful sense; pre-empting a rebirth.”

It’s not your average coffee table book, either: Lee has incorporated an element of scent for a total sensory experience. She’s no stranger to including olfactory elements in her art — it plays an important role in her gallery, and more recently in a collaboration for the 100th anniversary of Chanel N°5. For Asphyxiate, she called upon a Sydney-based nose who works with the French perfume capital, Grasse. “The scent has probably been the hardest part of the whole process,” Lee explains. “A very normal way to present a scent with a book would be to bottle it, but that didn’t feel right.” Instead, it’s an airbag that you pierce before opening the book.

If you’re expecting a lovely floral, think again: “It’s on the verge of unpleasant,” Lee says. “It’s an unusual scent, it’s not something you’d wear. I wanted it to encapsulate that ecstatic moment that apparently happens right before death, so the main note is soil, and what green might smell like — when you get a leaf and you squish it: that life smell that comes out. And metal. I made a real point of having no floral notes at all.

“When you stab the bag, you get that one hit of air, to go with ‘asphyxiate’, meaning ‘last air,’” she continues. “The whole point of it, and all my work, is to highlight the fact that everything is temporary, anything living is going to die. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying talks about 49 days between death and rebirth — days spent in bardo — and I wanted to encapsulate the feeling of that space because that’s what [the end of the floral series] is for us: time before we move onto the next stage. We have this moment, so let’s run with it.”

As for the next moment, Lee’s not so sure what she’ll do. “I’ll definitely be focusing on my original paintings that came before the floral series, but I want to leave that open and see where it leads,” Lee explains. O’Donnell will be hanging up his camera and relaunching his furniture design business. Lee is certain of one thing, though: she’ll be receiving roses from Mandalay Flowers every week, forever: “My love for Rose will continue even once I stop selling her.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Artworks by Vicki Lee and Ted O’Donnell.