This Artist Turns Flower Arrangements into Painted Sculptures

Looking at Sophie Parker’s floral designs, it’s hard to tell what’s natural and what’s artificial. The pieces she creates look alternately like living plants and like human-made sculptures. In a way, they are all both. 

Parker paints on and arranges plants with results that play with the difference between organic and handmade. Some motifs, like the checkerboard pattern, immediately show the human hand.

Others look like they could exist in nature. (If the rainbow eucalyptus exists, why not?)

Still others fall somewhere in between.

Parker described her process in a 2018 interview with Elle:

“When I begin a project I try to find botanical elements, often by foraging in the city, that have an almost whimsical quality, something that sets the imagination free and invites engagement or alteration. I have a background as a painter so I often find myself adjusting the colour or texture of the plants I’m using, or placing them in strange environments that reference architecture, cinema, or even memory. 

“I reshape and cut and twist until it feels like something new is growing. The tension between the natural and the artificial is deep in all of us and I love the idea that blurring that line between the organic and the handmade can illuminate a personal wildness.”

While Parker’s arrangements are beautiful, she says that’s not her goal. “I’m not so sure my main concern is making something beautiful,” she told Elle. “Flowers are already beautiful. My main rule might be to resist the seduction of a traditional vision of beauty, and instead search for something rare, or fierce, or funny, or sensual – something more natural.”

You can find more of Sophie Parker’s artwork on the website for her studio, WIFE.