"Kew makes me feel like a child again" she says, "because I'm always walking and you can see from horizon to horizon. I used to walk with my mother in the fields around Bovingdon in Hertfordshire, where we lived." This enhanced sense of scale - of endless horizons that trigger memories of childhood - is evident in Calla Lily. The painting is more like a landscape than a flower painting. Lying on its side, the purple petals undulate across the canvas like a range of hills floating on a surface densely worked in dark colours - black over midnight blue. A seam of pale blue traverses the interior like a thin line of light.

"I was in a plane" recalls Self, "and everything was black. Then, as the sun came up, a thin strip of light appeared along the horizon. The backgrounds are often based on skies, or on an internal darkness - a black part of me." With its rippling trajectory, the strange flower also reminds me of sound waves or a sting ray cruising the ocean floor. "In my mind was a Chinese scroll in the British Museum in which the hem of a dress is described in a wonderfully fluent line", says Self. "I often think the paintings are like dancing, because I draw with my whole arm. I draw the flower on canvas first, then colour it in."

Clearly these flowers are no ordinary blooms. A wealth of disparate associations gives them a disturbing intensity. Self often isolates a single bloom on a large canvas; yet, despite the enlargement, they do not have the hallucinatory clarity of, say, Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. This is partly due to the process. Having made a drawing of the flower, Self works from the drawing so that the final image is at one remove. "I'm dyslexic and have a photographic memory" she says, "so I paint the blooms from the image in my head - from my mind's eye." Her flowers remain an enigma, something remembered rather than revealed - emblems re-made in the unconscious.

She has been painting flowers for nine years now and a year at Kew hasn't changed her work so much as intensified its strangeness. She spent several nights in the Temperate House listening to the crows scrabbling about outside while watching the water lilies bloom. At first the flowers are white and male but, when pollinated, they turn red and become female. Given the eerie context, it is not surprising that Victoria Amazona looms up against its dark ground like an alien being. "Its very surreal at Kew" says Self. "I almost hallucinate there, partly because I spend so much time on my own. I call it West World."

Other paintings are overtly sexual. The fleshiness of Red Pansy Midsummer's Day is enhanced by the blood red that edges its petals like lipstick over bruising. Tinged a delicate pink, White Orchid is like a Rubens nude spreading ample thighs to reveal her sex. But the embarrassment induced by Pink Rose and Vermillion Rose is less easily explained. The flowers are so vivid that they trigger the smell of roses. Despite an almost melodramatic strangeness, these nests of shockingly vibrant colour are an overwhelming reminder of nature's gaudy splendour.'

Sarah Kent
August, 2001