In the artistic practice of Mat Collishaw, visually seductive images symbolise defiled beauty or forbidden pleasure. With this exclusive new-media artwork, Burning Flower, an orchid surrounded by blackness is both given life and destroyed by the surrounding flickering flames, slowly producing a glistening blood-red sap.

Notions of illusion, seduction and destruction become fused as the fire appears dangerous but attractive; a Victorian sensibility is foregrounded, where base instincts hover just beneath the surface of propriety. Collishaw began creating photographs of enchanting but tainted flowers in 2002, and this has become a repeated motif in his work.