Featured image: Mardi Gras Jester Skull Bouquet, Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, 2025, photography, 20 x 30 in. / 50.8 x 76.2 cm.
Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee’s latest series transforms traditional masks and sculptural symbols into living monuments woven from New Orleans flora.
Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee creates striking photographic portraits that merge cultural artifacts with botanical arrangements, exploring ritual, identity, and transformation.
Each photographed arrangement pairs a culturally charged object with a lush botanical construction, blurring the line between ritual and rebirth. The works celebrate heritage while reframing mythic identities through vibrant, organic forms.
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Devil Mask Bouquet, Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, 2025, photography, 20 x 30 in. / 50.8 x 76.2 cm.
In Devil Mask Bouquet, an Ecuadorian carnival mask emerges from a blazing crown of reds, yellows, and fiery golds. The red devil face, iconic in native Ecuadorian mythology, takes on a dual identity when encircled by wildflower abundance. The contrast between carved wood and soft petals heightens the work’s tension: mischief and celebration, fear and fertility, mythology and the living landscape. Hodgson-Rigsbee uses New Orleans garden blooms to build a bridge between cultures, emphasizing how ritual masks remain alive through interpretation, migration, and memory.
Clown Mask Bouquet, Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, 2025, photography, 20 x 30 in. / 50.8 x 76.2 cm.
Clown Mask Bouquet surrounds a Mardi Gras day mask with a saturated eruption of pinks, purples, and feathery whites. The expression is uncanny: cheerful yet hollow, playful yet unsettling. The floral arrangement amplifies this duality through its excessive sweetness, offering a visual commentary on the theatrical nature of self-presentation. The piece becomes a portrait of celebration culture, its humor, its absurdity, and its ability to act as both camouflage and confession. Collaboration with a horticulturalist adds a sculptural intentionality to the composition, making the bouquet feel ritualistic rather than decorative.
Skull Bouquet Aged, Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, 2025, photography, 20 x 30 in. / 50.8 x 76.2 cm.
In Skull Bouquet Aged, dried plants and skeletal stems burst upward from a stark, pale skull. All materials are native to the New Orleans region, grounding the piece in ecological memory and the cycles of life and decay. The withered textures contrast with the hard polish of the skull, creating a meditation on time, transformation, and the remnants we leave behind. Whereas the mask portraits vibrate with color and human expression, this work strips identity down to essence, reminding viewers that beauty persists even in collapse.
Taken together, these works illuminate how masks, symbols, and natural materials can work in unison to reveal personal and cultural identity. Hodgson-Rigsbee’s floral constructions act as extensions of the masks, turning them into hybrid beings: half artifact, half organism. Through photography, these temporal sculptures become permanent, preserving not only the flowers but the histories and emotional weight embedded within each object.
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