The Cummer Museum’s Bank of America Concourse Gallery welcomes Jacksonville-based photographer and artist Ashley Woodson Bailey with What Remains. This body of work explores the relationship between photography, time, and preservation through the botanical subject.
“Flowers have long functioned as a visual language in art, symbolizing beauty, mortality, and transformation,” Bailey shares. “I am drawn to the tension between fragility and permanence—how something inherently fleeting can be held, altered, and re-seen.”
In What Remains, floral photographs are presented alongside translucent grasscloth panels, shifting wallpaper from decorative surface into something closer to a preserved specimen. The photographs function as both record and memory, while the textile panels emphasize physical presence, moving the work between image and object.
In dialogue with Moment in Time, A Legacy of Photographs and Art in Bloom, What Remains reflects on how artists attempt to hold onto beauty and how every act of preservation inevitably transforms what it seeks to save.
Image credits:
Ashley Woodson Bailey (American, b. 1973), Dark Iris, 2024, photographic print.
Ashley Woodson Bailey (American, b. 1973), Petunia, 2025, photographic print.
Ashley Woodson Bailey (American, b. 1973), Prairie, 2024, photographic print.