LENOX, MA.- Sohn Fine Art is presenting Sanctuary of Petals, a group exhibition that explores the enduring allure of the natural world through four artists’ visions: Valda Bailey, Edward Merritt, JP Terlizzi, and Hans Withoos. The exhibition invites visitors into a richly imagined botanical sanctuary where flowers communicate through symbols of transformation, memory, and wonder. The featured artists work with mixed media, photography, and unconventional artistic processes. While each artist approaches the floral subject from a unique perspective, together they create an immersive dialogue that celebrates both the beauty and complexity of nature.
For centuries, flowers have served as visual metaphors, carrying meanings that transcend words. They have served as symbols of love, remembrance, hope, and renewal. During the Victorian era, this symbolism evolved into the practice of floriography, often referred to as the "language of flowers," in which specific blooms conveyed coded messages that social convention often left unspoken. A single flower or bouquet could express affection, admiration, gratitude, longing, or sympathy. While Sanctuary of Petals draws inspiration from this rich tradition, the artists reinterpret it with a contemporary lens, transforming botanical subjects into expressive works that blur the boundaries between observation and invention. Rather than documenting nature, each artist reveals its emotional, symbolic, and ephemeral qualities, inviting viewers to consider flowers as vessels of narrative, memory, growth, impermanence and imagination.
Valda Bailey, Extravagant Grace, 30” x 52.5” Photograph. Archival Pigment Print
Valda Bailey lives in Sussex, England. She took up photography at the age of 14 but her first creative passion was painting, and she remains strongly influenced by this medium. Bailey’s expressionistic photographic works dissolve the boundaries between realism and abstraction, layering movement, texture, and light into painterly compositions that evoke emotion rather than documentation. Her images encourage viewers to experience flowers as fleeting impressions that are alive with energy, color, and atmosphere. Portraying an interpretation of a scene rather than a literal representation, Bailey makes her images using in-camera multiple exposure and ICM (intentional camera movement). Always pushing the boundaries of photography, she has a particular fascination for the middle ground where photography and painting overlap. Bailey’s work has been exhibited worldwide and featured in broadsheet newspapers, as well as national and international publications and is held in corporate and private collections all over the globe.
Edward Merritt, Red Flowers in a Blue Woven Urn, 48” x 48” Recycled discarded building paint, graffiti en verso, recycled found spray paint. Poured, dried, cut and then woven on wood panel. Unique, Signed.
Edward Merritt transforms botanical forms through innovative mixed-media techniques that merge materials recycled from urban environments with tactile surfaces and experimental processes. His detailed works invite close observation, revealing unexpected dimensions of familiar natural subjects while blurring the distinction between representation and abstraction. Merritt explores the fundamental challenge of creating without destroying in return. He places great value on the environmental impacts of his own artmaking process. Merritt’s creations are carefully constructed narratives about the human condition, introspection, interpersonal relationships, social politics, unexpected beauty and love.
JP Terlizzi, Hooded Oriole with Citrus Nesting, 2025. 32” x 60”. Photograph. Dye Sublimation on Aluminium.
JP Terlizzi is a New York City photographer whose images are heavily influenced around the notion of home, legacy, and family. He is curious how the past relates and intersects with the present and how the present enlivens the past, shaping one’s identity. Terlizzi’s practice transforms botanical imagery into compelling visual narratives that celebrate both fragility and resilience. Through his evocative use of composition and symbolism, Terlizzi captures not only the physical essence of objects but also their emotional and cultural significance, creating images that resonate with personal histories and collective memories. Sohn Fine Art is excited to be the first gallery to debut his newest body of work, “Sanctuary of the Winged”. This work came directly to the gallery from an exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum. Following the end of a long-term relationship Terlizzi redefined home, reconsidering what he had gathered over the years. He began to see how those choices reflected his evolving identity - much like the way birds build nests that embody their needs, roles, and personalities. In this series, the feathered hat and birds become metaphors for survival, adaptation, and self-expression. For birds, feathers aren’t just beautiful - they’re tools for attracting a mate, signaling strength, or offering protection. For us, what we wear, what we collect, or surround ourselves with communicate who we are, where we belong, and how we wish to be seen. The recurring arch carries this dialogue further; it’s more than a compositional device, it functions as a threshold, a passage into transformation. Ultimately, this work reflects how both humans and birds utilize adornment and environment not only as means of survival, but also to connect and express identity.
Drawing inspiration from the Dutch Golden Age, Hans Withoos constructs fantastical floral worlds populated by exotic botanicals, insects, and wildlife, creating scenes that are simultaneously timeless and unmistakably modern. Renowned for his meticulous attention to detail and narrative prowess, Withoos presents still life as a conduit for storytelling. His artworks are imbued with symbolic layers that speak to themes of ancestry, identity, and the human condition, inviting viewers to decipher the rich tapestry of meanings woven within each meticulously crafted tableau. In 2016, Hans started researching the paintings of his ancestor Mathias Withoos (1627-1703), whose artworks are in muesums and collections world-wide including paintings in the Queen of England’s castle. He also studied the artworks of Mathias’ children, Alida, Pieter and Johannes, who mostly created gouaches of nature. Furthering his connection to these ancestors, and inspired by them, Withoos started integrating aspects of their artworks into his own, combining subjects from their paintings with his own photography. This resulted in timeless, surrealistic artworks rich in romantic stories set in worlds of abundance and artifice. This matches with notions of impermanence, which often finds its way into his work through unexpected decay or destruction. His work has been shown in several museums world-wide.
