Hi there. It's been a while, again. I've been keeping busy.
I have so many things to share, but today I am sharing something very special, my collaboration with Simone Truong, a wonderful artist from the UK who is as obsessed with flowers as I am.
Simone and I discovered each other through my friend Danielle's blog, The Jealous Curator. Simone had seen my work on The Jealous Curator back in May, and I discovered Simone's gorgeous, ethereal work on a post this past October, on which I immediately left a comment about collaborating with her. Simone got back to me posthaste, and we have spent the last month or so collaborating on these four new pieces of work, which I am very happy to present to you today.
Paraphrasing from our statement on this work:
Although working in different mediums, different scales and even different countries, Simone and I both have one element in common; our subject matter. Flora are at the center of both of our works, inevitably forging an exploration into the difference in scale and mediums. In this new work, Simone strays away from exploring the transitionary states that occur in natural phenomena to embrace the delicate and still beauty of my giant, intricate paper flowers. By scaling these large, explosive blooms back down to a size manageable on the printed page, Simone has captured their solitary beauty in a way their original capacity never would have granted. We worked together to find the tension and balance in these compositions, which were executed by Simone in her UK studio.
To put it very simply, we have taken my giant flower heads and scaled them down to what would be their natural size and state, knowing there is nothing natural about these flowers with their hundreds and hundreds of petals made of paper. We have worked with emotional tone, composition, scale and color, and treated the pieces with Simone's beautiful and mysterious techniques, described on The Jealous Curator as akin to swiping a finger to "taste the pretty iced roses of my childhood birthday cakes".
These images of my "fake" flowers, being preserved this way, suspended in space forever, are somewhat dishonest, in the most subtle of ways. If you didn't know the back-story on this work, you might never notice that these faux flowers have way too many petals, or that they were already fated never to wilt. Reducing them and then hanging them in space, stemless, as Simone does? There is a lot of mystery in that, and I love it.
The four images below are the final products of our collaboration. We are offering giclée prints in an open-edition run, 11 x 14" on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl paper. They are gorgeous, and I cannot wait to have them hanging in our home and my studio area. If you are interested in ordering, you can find them all here in my online shop.
I hope you like them as much as we do. It was a privilege to work with Simone. I love collaborations, and this one was a great fit.
On another subject, I am running a wonderful 1920's style metallic floral headpiece class this Sunday, and a few more before the end of the year. I'd love to see you in one of my workshops! Visit my workshop page for class descriptions and registration information. I have some unique classes scheduled this season.
Have a wonderful weekend!
xoxo
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