Sometimes, romances bloom like wildflowers—suddenly, unruly, and beyond classification. In Wild Flowers, unexpected carnal encounters unfold across the pages of what at first glance resembles an old naturalist’s handbook. Yet beneath the surface of botanical detail, bodies and blossoms alike surrender to a deeper instinct: to reveal themselves in new shapes and colors, through fleeting seasons of desire.
This volume brings together selections from James Gallagher’s Touch and Desire collage series (2010–2020), interwoven with twenty exquisite floral illustrations from Wild Flowers Worth Knowing (1919), adapted by Asa Don Dickinson from Neltje Blanchan’s Nature’s Garden. Through this dialogue between vintage flora and contemporary eroticism, Wild Flowers reimagines both nature and human intimacy as layered, hybrid acts of revelation.
Playful unions and acrobatic connections emerge from Gallagher’s meticulously cut paper silhouettes—figures in motion, chasing touch and temptation along the edges of desire. From his Brooklyn studio, Gallagher channels a visual repertoire that feels both nostalgic and fantastical, echoing the bittersweet sensuality of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). The book includes not only a screenshot from the film’s opening credits but also its unforgettable closing lines—Bud and Fran’s final exchange, which lingers like a perfume or a memory.
The typographic choices further root this hybrid object in a lost New York: the book’s title is composed not from a digital font, but from fragments of pre-Helvetica NYC subway signage—letters cut from the urban past, repurposed and recombined like the lovers and flowers within.
In the end, Wild Flowers becomes an allegory of collage itself: a quiet shuffling of bodies, cards, petals, and paper. Each cut a gesture of intimacy. Each juxtaposition a secret rendezvous. The missing link is not what divides these elements, but what binds them—the collage as a form, and as a feeling.
