Molly Wood is a photographer based in Des Moines, Iowa. Her images use botanicals as metaphors for personal experiences and explore the interplay between modern technologies and art history. While using recent digital advances in photography, all of her images are styled using only natural window light with traditional Dutch still life paintings in mind. She creates portraits of these botanicals in formal, sacred spaces, often at an intensely intimate distance Her series Fatal Flora features plants used for centuries for sustenance, medicine and later associated with witchcraft. These botanicals act as stand-ins for the complexity and duality of experiences in life that can be part healing and part toxic. In growing and handling these dangerous plants throughout their growth cycles, she studies their seductive beauty, as well as taming and controlling their deadly potential. Wood’s Omnia Vanitas series is a continuation of her interest in art historical references and focuses on memento mori vignettes of botanicals and symbols of ephemerality. The images are meditations on the fleeting passage of time, the transience of material things and the inevitability of change. These quiet tableaus serve as reminders of impermanence and mortality while still celebrating the beauty of the physical world. Wood earned an undergraduate degree in Photojournalism at TCU in Ft Worth, Texas and then went on to get a Master’s in Art History focusing on photography from SMU in Dallas. She manages commercial photo shoots at Meredith Corporation for Better Homes and Gardens products. Wood has held solo exhibitions at the Sioux City Art Center*, the Dubuque Museum of Art, Iowa State University, St Ambrose University in Davenport, Southern Methodist University in Dallas and at Muscatine Art Museum in Muscatine, Iowa. Wood has been included in exhibitions at the Figge Museum of Art, the Colorado Center for Photography (Denver), the Center for Fine Art Photography (Ft Collins, CO), the Southeast Center for Photography (Greenville, SC), the Midwest Center for Photography (Wichita), and the Kansas City Society of Contemporary Photography. Wood was the subject of a cover article in the July / August 2018 issue of DSM Magazine and was named a 2018 Iowa Arts Council Fellow. Her work is in the corporate collections of J.P. Morgan Chase, Banker’s Trust, Farm Bureau and Principal Group as well as the permanent collection of the Sioux City Art Center. * https://siouxcityartcenter.org/exhibition/molly-wood-the-poison-garden/