...And then there’s Tiffanie Turner, based in Fairfax, Calif., who is widely acknowledged as the progenitor and doyenne of the new generation of paper-flower makers, teaching popular workshops on the subject. She shows her work in galleries and museums, like the De Young and the Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco and Winston Wächter Fine Art in Seattle. “I like it when people see the art form as more than mere decoration,” she says. The 50-year-old has been creating her greenery for nearly a decade, making oversize and exaggeratedly realistic dahlias and peonies; each can take well over 400 hours to finish. Over the past five years, she has explored the concept of wilt, intrigued by people’s proclivity for withered paper blooms despite their distaste for natural floral decay. Her pieces appear as if they’re browning and shriveling, losing symmetry and color. Last year, Turner also created a collapsed rose whose petals appear to have faded from pink to white; their placement, she says, “looks exactly like a vagina.”
We venerate flowers for their perfection, the precise array of petals as comforting as an architectural rendering — but it is their ephemerality that truly makes them priceless. “I’m trying to make you see that there is visual poetry in every stage, even the end, right before everything falls apart,” Turner says. “Maybe if we can be OK with that in a flower, we can be OK with it in ourselves.”
