Tiffanie Turner is an American paper artist most well known for her large-scale botanical paper sculptures, so life-like, they leave the viewer in awe. Turner’s prior career as an architect has influenced her knowledge and understanding of construction and how things are put together, but the artist’s true inspiration comes from the beauty and distress found in our declining natural environment.
Replicating each petal, filaments and stem with life-like realism – Turner brings nature’s small wonders up close and personal
Turner’s sculptures most often depict different plants, mostly the heads of flowers, with extreme attention to detail and realism – with one exception – size. While having an incredible skill to accurately replicate each petal and filament, she plays with scale in a mesmerizing way. Working 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 fascination.
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.
“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”, Turner writes in her artist statement.
Accessibility and familiarity of nature is the key to Turner’s works popularity
On the reason for the popularity of her work, she recites the familiarity and accessibility of the subject matter, as flowers and plants allow an “easy in” for people.”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”, Turner explains.
Beyond creating one-of-a-kind paper sculptures for exhibitions and private collectors, which can each take between 250-400 hours to make, Turner is an instructor in the art of paper flower teaching paper enthusiasts across the globe via workshops, as well as with her very successful book The Fine Art of Paper Flowers.
Enjoy more of Turner’s beautiful work on Instagram, and if you crave for more paper art inspiration, read our previous articles Guy Laramée Turns Discarded Titles Into Majestic Landscapes and Calvin Nicholls Turns Fine Papers Into Low Relief Sculptures.
Images © Tiffanie Turner