THE FLOWER
STORY

I make textile gardens, combining floral photography, tapestry, thread, paint, and traditional handwork techniques.

In 2016, I was having a terrible time in my art practice. After more than a decade as an abstract painter, I became creatively stuck in my work.

Really stuck. I was unable to produce anything coherent with my paintbrush, my colors muddied, and the compositions didn’t flow. It was as if my brain had forgotten what I had done over the past twelve years. I was frozen in place.

So I began photographing cultivated flowers, blooms, buds, weeds, and wild things I found growing on the side of the road. A LOT of them.

Looking back, taking photos was my way to manage the increasing creative stress and what felt like the possible end of my painting practice.

But in the deep looking through the lens — at flowers in all stages of life, with their exquisite micro-details and breathtaking colorations — I began to sense something larger than the flowers themselves. Something symbolically alive.

That season of slightly obsessive picture-taking not only forged a way forward in my studio; it opened up a different way to see and perceive the living world around me — and deepened my connection with the natural landscape.

I'm heidi,
ARTIST

Flowers with bent stems, missing petals, torn leaves, and insect holes are found throughout my images. I’m drawn to their “imperfections,” finding them hauntingly beautiful and truthful.

When weeds, faded flowers, and dying blooms are placed alongside a perfect bloom, they speak to an expanded definition of value and inclusion.

These elements, in a classic garden sense, are often not celebrated, welcomed, or seen.

So after taking more than 7,000 photographs that year, I fell deeply in love with flowers.

And the flowers became a new visual language for what would become my tapestry and textile garden works.

In their fragility, I also see resilience and strength — tenacity, grit, and the will to thrive and flourish despite the odds — a reflection of our own human spirit.

In the tapestries, the flowers become human scale.

Their familiarity invites us closer to nature.

Their presence asks us to slow down, notice what is beautiful and alive, and remember our connection to the living world — and perhaps, back to ourselves.

WHAT I SEE IN FLOWERS

The Tapestry Gardens