This series of sublime images by the photographer Madeleine Farley revisits Dutch floral painting from the 17th century. Each day she followed a ritual: masked, she bought flowers from a gas station on a busy road, then entered a dark room, silent and dressed in black, to find their voices under staged light. The Dutch painters - also in the shadow of plague - describe contradiction, immortalising what is fugitive in a language of life and death with rare flowers. The spectres here also explore contradiction: schemes are evoked by chance; nature and artifice blur as sunlight is shot by LED; light and mass, movement and stillness, are uncertain; colour is at once vivid and rarefied; commercial flowers become luxuriant, visionary. And the conflicting influences finally reveal emotion. Flowers perish; we perish: this is the message of the early painters and of these images, conceived in the darkness of quarantine as the world is undone.