April Showers Bring ... Giant Paper Flowers
Architect turned Botanical Sculptor, Tiffanie Turner, creates 5-foot-wide flower compositions by cutting thousands of segments of paper and piecing them together to create works of art. Her works can take up to 400 hours to complete by hand. Her artwork explores nature’s bloom and deterioration.
“I am forever moved by the specimens found in nature, the dynamism of a flower on the stem and in the vase, changing with the season or by the day, here one month then gone for the next eleven. Through my work, teaching, and public residencies, I have learned that the familiarity and accessibility of flowers and plants allows an “easy in” for people, and when the viewer is not afraid of the subject matter, it opens up numerous conversations. Using the accessible nature of botany, I want to continue to have these dialogues to test the limits of our tolerance of fading beauty, of human vanity, human compassion and human caused destruction, and to tell stories of the state of our environment.”
“My sculptures depict the appearance of different plants, mostly the heads of flowers, to some degree of accuracy, in paper, using both realism and preternaturally large, sometimes metastasized forms. Through my works in paper I study scale, texture (petals sometimes reading like feathers, or fur) and color. Each piece can take between 250-400 hours to complete. I work with the rhythms and patterns found in nature, as well as the wonderful gestures formed by missteps and irregularities in nature like decay, rot, wilt, dormancy, death, and genetic and viral mutations like phyllody, petalody and fasciation. I like to bring the smallest things we take for granted or that might go unnoticed, like the shape of the smallest floret of a flower, right to the viewer’s face, when one may realize they never knew them at all.”
In 2017, Turner published her first book titled "The Fine Art of Paper Flower".
“A true labor of love, this book includes every single trick I use for making paper flowers, even a tutorial for one of my large paper peonies. I am not afraid to tell you that this book is unlike any paper flower book out there right now, and I hope it will stay on craft and coffee tables alike for years to come.”
Purchase her book today and check out more of Turner's work on her website or on her instagram!