AR enabled.

I had no words for this painting when I posted it earlier, and it didn’t go to my exhibition on the 6th and 13th of June because of its inherent violence. Now I do have the words, and although it won’t be in a physical exhibition in the foreseeable future, it can take its place here with a complete narrative. The AR carries the message.

WarFlowers

Guns, apparently, don’t fire, they blossom.

Or so say the soldiers, eighteen years old and full of borrowed whimsy and flimsy bravado.

But then it begins.

In slow motion, the explosion emerges from the barrel and spreads in rippling streaks outward

while the bullet it has propelled, a tiny hell, a cauteriser of flesh, and shatterer of bones with no power of its own, 

carves its way through the soft, yielding, Spring-of-its-life body

as if it were merely

a thing, there only to meet its target and deliver its payload.  

Then, having stolen a life through blind insentience

it ends its own; its sentence for murder

to be buried in a concrete wall with the fallen millions of its kind

until history matches the blood to the victim

and justice floods the past with light.  

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2026