Hanging gardens

On 7 October, a remarkable floral installation goes on display in Kew’s Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. Sue Herdman talks to its creator, the artist Rebecca Louise Law

Rebecca’s exhibition Still Life, at The Broadway Gallery, Letchworth, in 2016, combined both dried and fresh flowers

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K ew’s Shirley Sherwood Gallery is the world’s first public art space dedicated to botanical art. If you have a passion for the medium, beautifully framed and hung on walls, it’s the place to go. That is, until

now. While remaining true to its botanical roots, the gallery is about to try something different. The result will be, says Maria Devaney, Kew’s galleries and exhibitions leader, ‘unlike anything experienced at Kew before.’ All sense of 2D will be suspended, to make way for a 3D installation of 1,000 garlands, each 5m long, created from preserved flowers. Flowing and tumbling from ceiling height – and more or less filling the spaces – this sculptural installation will take floral art off the walls and, by enabling you to walk through it, give you a sense of entering a botanical painting.

The work is by London-based artist Rebecca Louise Law. Over the past 15 years, Rebecca has built a reputation for pioneering site-specific installations. For each one she uses just two core ingredients: copper wire and flowers. In 2015, at Viacom’s headquarters in New York’s Times Square, she created a work comprising 16,000 blooms. Last year, in Melbourne, Australia, she amassed some 150,000 preserved and locally grown flowers to create a permanent installation called The Canopy, where her canvas was the ceiling of a shopping mall. Other commissions have been for Westminster Abbey,

and galleries as far afield as the Chandran in San Francisco. With every project her work becomes more intricate, yet each is linked, in some way, to the early experiences that inform her art.

Rebecca comes from six generations of gardeners and artists. Her father was head gardener of the National Trust’s Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. For the artist and her siblings – ‘free-range children’ – the Abbey and surrounding landscape was a playground. She recalls, specifically, a day when, as a teenager out with her family, she lay in a field of wildflowers. The sense of being overwhelmed by nature has never left her. Other childhood factors, too, have fed her art. An attic playroom where they were encouraged to draw and paint was hung with hundreds of dried flowers from her parents’ allotment. ‘I wasn’t aware that I was taking them in at some level,’ she says, ‘but it is a picture – and an accompanying scent of dried flowers – that lingers. I began to draw, becoming obsessed with flowers.’

Rebecca studied for a BA in Fine Art from 2000 to 2004. During this time, frustrated with what she saw as an inability to bring the true verve of nature to canvas, she began to explore the flower as a sculptural material. She soon swapped her paints for flowers and began to move towards installation work. ‘I wanted,’ she explains, ‘for my art to feel as if I was walking into a flower.’ It was a step not without challenges. ‘Flora is a complex material,’ she admits. ‘I was using flowers as my paint; I needed to start to understand my chosen material.’ She undertook work experience with florists, learning how cultivation, suppliers and flower markets work. She observed the speed at which professional florists created arrangements. ‘This transformed me as an artist. An installation was taking me a year. Today it can be a month.’ She also researched, in depth, the history, art, antiquity and symbolism of flowers.

On leaving university, Rebecca was employed as an artist for the florist McQueens. In time she embraced her own practice full time and received an important commission from Hermès. They wanted an installation, for one evening, for the Royal Opera House’s Floral Hall. When they asked her what she could do, she answered: ‘the most extreme thing possible.’ She suspended fresh flowers from ceiling to floor. The effect was arresting. As Rebecca hates waste (she retains every flower, unless an installation is permanent), once the party was over she and some helpers dismantled the installation and took it to a church in London, where she wrapped the starting-to-fade blooms around pillars. In the morning, she was asked to remove them. The no-longer-fresh flowers, she was told, had covered the pillars ‘with death’. This was a key moment – already sensitive to reactions to dying flowers (one woman cried when viewing her graduation work), now Rebecca recognised the challenge she faced in proving the worth of flowers as a material when they are, as she calls it, ‘beyond fresh’. As she preserves her blooms she is, she says, working ‘against the cycle of life and death, trying to hold on to a material – the fresh flower – that traditionally has little or no value in modern culture. I want to create an art that enables humankind to have serenity with nature… where there is still life in death.’

Her six-month project for Kew – she has called the installation Life in Death – has chimed perfectly with this striving. It has also given her something special, the ability to now bring

Left: The Canopy, in a Melbourne shopping mall, features 150,000 Australian native flowers – the Life in Death installation at Kew will feature an incredible 375,000 blooms

Below: The Hated Flower, a cascade of chrysanthemums and carnations, gives a contemporary twist to these most traditional of blooms

Left: inspired by Dutch still-life paintings, Rebecca created a series of encased smaller-scale 3D works in 2015, including Hydrangea, Gypsophila...

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to the ceiling and the garlands installed, each flower bobbing delicately on its fine copper wire.

The messages behind this installation are many. Despite the belief that flowers are short lived, these garlands – as with those from the tombs – are not ephemeral. The installation – delicate, natural, organic – has the capacity to outlast us. Flowers are a material, Rebecca believes, that should be used in a serious, cultural way. For viewers, the installation will be, as she describes it, ‘like walking through a weeping willow – yet it is still a garland. It has form. There is, through the old scent of the preserved flowers, a perception of time, a value in seeing something that has been treasured and reused. That sense of age brings wonder and respect.’ Her wish is that viewers will feel consumed by nature, just as she was as a young girl in that wildflower meadow, with the same sense of hush, yet, in the gallery space, on ‘a church-like scale’. Observers, she hopes, will ‘find a peacefulness in the work and an appreciation of what this Earth gives us.’—Sue Herdman is an arts writer, editor and consultant

to a close her focus on value beyond new and move on to other areas. During her research in Kew’s Herbarium and Economic Botany Collection, one group of artefacts in particular was a revelation to her: Egyptian garlands dating from 1700BC. Beautifully preserved in darkened tombs for centuries, this ‘fantastic find’ gave Rebecca hard evidence of the worth of flowers beyond fresh. ‘Here, at last, was proof that, given the right conditions, you can preserve and dry flowers into forms that are resilient shells of the original blooms.’ Those ancient garlands, on which Rebecca has based her sculpture, will be displayed close to her installation.

The work will also reflect Kew’s global horticultural range. Featuring some 375,000 flowers cultivated from across the world – and using her entire collection of preserved flora from the past decade – each of the 1,000 garlands took a day to make. Prior to their installation, every flower was, as with every plant that arrives at Kew, treated by freezing in the Herbarium’s giant freezers, to kill off any potential incoming pests. Once the flowers were ready, the rigging (‘the most elegant yet – viewers will barely be able to see it’) was raised

Follow the artHead out from the exhibition to discover more artworks by four environmental artists within the Gardens

—For more on Rebecca’s work, go to rebeccalouiselaw.com.

The Kew installation and accompanying exhibition Life in Death runs from 7 October to 11 March, in Kew’s

Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art – see kew.org for opening times. For more events in Kew’s galleries, see p65.

— A beautiful new hardback book to accompany the exhibition, from Kew Publishing, is available in the

Gallery and at Kew’s Victoria Plaza Shop, RRP £25. SAVE £5 – special Kew price £20.

Each flower is individually and painstakingly attached to fine copper wire, with a garland taking around a day to complete – Life in Death will feature 1,000 garlands

The Yellow Flower (Sasebo, Japan, 2014) was made of thousands of golden chrysanthemums, a flower that holds great cultural significance to the Japanese

As part of Kew’s Artful Autumn festival, 16 site-specific works by four environmental artists are on display from 7 to 29 October, within the landscape that inspired them. Outside the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art and along Cedar Vista you’ll find an array of beautiful, creative and intriguing sculptures and paintings.

The artists & their work

JULIA CLARKE (above) – WICKER SCULPTURESNatural materials and environmental concerns are key elements in Julia’s work, and these 3D sculptures display her fascination with scale, tactile qualities and natural forms. Visitors can also help to create an additional willow sculpture at weekend taster sessions in October – see p63.

NIGEL ROSS – WOODEN SEATING SCULPTURESInspired by the rhythms of nature, landscape and the art of the Celts, Picts and other ancient cultures, Nigel carves his sculptures from sustainably sourced tree trunks.

CLAUDIA WEGNER – LARGE PAINTINGSFascinated by fungi and their medicinal properties, Claudia has created a series of four large, detailed paintings that reveal the hidden beauty and complexity of fungi.

WOODY FOX WILLOW – THE TREELINGS Focusing on the connection between humans and nature, and the joy of walking in the woods in autumn, Woody has created a group of willow figures – a cross between plants and people – practising tai chi in the great outdoors.

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