ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of a contemporary commemorative artwork, Flowers of War, focusing on how visitors sensed and understood its meaning and appearance in a range of ways. The artwork was a unique opportunity to explore how individualised aesthetic experience related to public commemoration, and to do so at the moment of encounter on a significant day of remembrance. The chapter explores not only how people perceived and reacted to an artwork, but also how this related to their experience of the shared commemorative moment at the centre of this book, 11 November 2018. It argues that art offers us a way to consider what social and cultural work commemoration does in the present, and its potential (or not) into the future to support shared identities, because of its capacity to create a common point of experience without demanding that everyone understands it in the same way.
