Tiffanie Turner

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In ‘American Grown,’ Tiffanie Turner Roots Out Personal Memories and U.S. Exceptionalism

In preparing for her newest body of work, Tiffanie Turner sowed three ideas: to expand the standard shapes of her sculptures, to draw underrecognized connections, and to unearth a long-held concern about American culture.

An architect by training, the artist (previously) is known for her incredibly lifelike paper flowers that explore beauty standards and aging through dramatic decay and flawed growths. Her interests in recent years have largely been universal, questioning the nature of imperfection and human vanity or the impending destruction caused by the climate crisis.

But in American Grown, Turner turns toward the personal. Two and a half years in the making, the series comprises ten massive sculptures made with the artist’s signature crepe-paper petals layered in dense masses. The flowers embody both an artistic challenge—one of the three principles behind the collection was to leave behind the circular, wall-mounted form in favor of more conical, gravity-defying constructions—and a deeply introspective look at Turner’s own life. “After spending over two years with this body of work, thinking almost every day about where this idea of the United States being ‘the greatest nation’ in the family I grew up in, I think I figured it out,” she tells Colossal, sharing that she’s circling around how American exceptionalism is deeply rooted in culture and often passed through generations.

The idea for this body of work came about during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic “when her shame about being an American was at an all-time high. A cartoon of an American was swirling in her head: a styleless, gun-loving, misogynistic, God-fearing racist,” a statement says. Like her earlier pieces, Turner returned to universality as she realized that these traits are not always unique to the U.S. Instead, she used that caricature as a starting point to explore this belief in superiority and to connect to “her childhood, comparing and contrasting the standards and safeguards around the raising of her two children with memories of her grandparents and parents, focusing on the past, present, and future, in the timeframe of 1950 to 2050.”

 

Ephemerality is inherent in Turner’s blossoms, as she preserves the fleeting state of freshness in paper. But where earlier works featured browning petals on the outer edges, those in American Grown are central. A dark rot emanates from the inside of “Excerpt from Still Life with flowers on a marble tabletop”—this piece takes its title from a Rachel Ruysch painting—while the base of the towering “Croquembouche” is laced with decay, suggesting that there’s something insidious not on the fringe but directly at the heart.

The final tenet of the series is discovery and connection. Turner references the two-headed “Cocksome Rose,” which resembles a fasciated strawberry of the same name, and her desire to draw similarities between disparate objects. Even if viewers don’t connect the two misshapen forms, she hopes that “they will still wonder about the piece, and perhaps find something in it that [the artist] hasn’t yet seen.”

American Grown will be on view from September 9 to October 21 at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. Head to Instagram to glimpse Turner’s process and follow updates on her work.

 

Art Climate

Dramatic Decaying Flowers in Tiffanie Turner’s Solo Show “What Befell Us” Challenge Notions of Beauty and Perfection

In her latest solo exhibition, What Befell Us, California-based artist Tiffanie Turner explores notions of aging, imperfection, and perishability. Massive flower blossoms including dahlias, garden roses, ranunculus, and strawflowers are formed from Italian crepe paper and span more than five feet across. While in her previous work Turner strove for the ideal phenotype of each flower, in What Befell Us the artist pushes past perfection to investigate our collective relationship to flaws and damage.

The artist shares with Colossal that she felt strongly pulled to focus on climate change and environmental peril in her latest show. She expresses concern that humans’ resistance to perishability with plastic and preservatives also hastens irreparable damage to the earth. And, as a woman experiencing aging in a superficial society, Turner saw personal parallels with our global obsession with freshness and perfection. She explains:

When I started to choose my specimens for this show, instead of superimposing formal imperfections onto these pieces, I sought out flowers that are beautiful even though they are not perfect. For example, the two strawflowers in the show are two sides of the same coin. One is still bright and colorful, but its center is deformed as it starts to lose moisture. The other is older, its petals slumped back from the fading, greying center. Each are “imperfect”, but both are undeniably still beautiful. Why just keep trying to create more beauty. Why can’t we just see more things as beautiful?

What Befell Us is on view at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco through June 15, 2019. Follow along with Turner’s latest work via Instagram. And if you’re inspired to create paper flowers of your own, the artist’s in-depth instructional book is available on Bookshop.

Books Colossal Craft Design

Tiffanie Turner’s Debut Book Shows How To Create Her Masterful Paper Flowers

We’ve long admired the breathtaking botanical artwork crafted by San Francisco-based artist Tiffanie Turner (previously here and here). Combining her architectural training with a love of the natural world, Turner has pioneered a seemingly infinite number of techniques to craft incredibly lifelike flowers from everyday materials. And, after years of refining her unique art form, her debut book The Fine Art of Paper Flowers will be published on August 22nd.

In her comprehensive photo-filled 254-page book, Turner starts from the ground up, detailing materials and basic techniques, doling out dye recipes, and offering species-specific construction guides for leaves, stems, and buds. Finished projects range from delicate cosmos to peonies the size of a fully-grown person, and include options for personal accessories like everlasting boutonnieres and flower crowns that channel Frida Kahlo. Turner generously shares every aspect of her years of acquired knowledge in her friendly voice, with step-by-step instructions that read somewhere between a cookbook and a novel.

And, if you live in the Chicago area or would like to visit our fair city, we are thrilled to be hosting Tiffanie for two workshops and a book signing on September 26th. Tiffanie will be teaching how to make Cosmos or Double Bomb Peonies (or both!) in an intimate workshop setting held at Colossal’s HQ. There will also be a free book signing, where copies of Tiffanie’s book will be available for purchase. Tickets and info for the workshops can be found on Colossal.

Art Design

New Giant Paper Flower Sculptures by Tiffanie Turner

Tiffanie Turner (previously) individually cuts thousands of segments of paper to piece together her often 5-foot-wide flower compositions, works that can take up to 400 hours to complete by hand. Turner’s artwork aims to explore nature’s bloom and decay, and during a recent residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco she enlisted over 4,000 visitors to collectively compose and then destroy a Ranunculus sculpture while stationed at the museum during the month of May.

Many of the works she created while in residence will head to the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts for an exhibition opening August 9th and running through September 18th, 2016. You can see more of Turner’s work on her blog and Instagram.

Art Design

Giant Paper Flowers by Tiffanie Turner

Spanning nearly three feet wide, these giant fluffy flowers were crafted from paper by San Francisco-based artist and architect Tiffanie Turner. Because of the massive scale of each piece a single flower can take upward of 35-80 hours to assemble from crepe paper. She shares via her artist statement:

My work in paper stems from my background as an architect, particularly my interest in how things are made and the use of repetitive elements, along with my lifelong obsession with flowers and botanical drawings. The exploration of scale plays heavily into everything I do, and the organized chaos and rhythms in nature make the heads of flowers an excellent case study for me.

Later this week Turner opens a show titled “Heads” at Rare Device that runs through May 28, 2014. You can see more on her blog, and several pieces are available for purchase here. (via The Jealous Curator, My Modern Met)