About me

Hello, I’m Fiona.
I live in the beautiful Pennine hills in West Yorkshire, UK, with my husband and Flo the rescue whippet.

Our long reaching views down the wooded valley endlessly inspire me and inform my work.

My background is varied and on the face of it, disparate, having worked for twenty years in the fast paced commercial world of printing, then a further twenty years as a hard-working event floral designer.

I now combine all my loves, passions and talents acquired along the way and exist as what can probably best be described as a multi media artist, working mostly on installations, exhibitions, commissions and educating.

Bio

A pioneer of the British flowers movement, trailblazer of sustainable installations and innovative floral designer, Fiona is an experimental artist, photographer and educator - forever evolving, dabbling and experimenting with new techniques, methods and practices.

Working with texture, movement and a tight colour palette, Fiona creates dramatic designs and images using seasonal, locally sourced and foraged materials, often including the earth itself. Drawn to the overlooked or damaged as well as items others consider to be ugly or waste, Fiona’s alchemy transforms these humble ingredients into melancholic works of art, evoking deep emotions in the observer.

my work

backstory

I studied and had a successful career in the fast paced, pressurised corporate world of Commercial Printing and worked with some of the best design agencies as my clients. I developed a great eye for colour, thanks to their demanding and minute colour corrections; as well as a life-long love of textured paper and a fascination with letterpress printing.

During my busy career my garden was a place of sanctuary from my stressful & pressurised job - at the age of twenty four I was obsessed with everything gardening and have had a love of it ever since.

Whilst toying with self employment, I dithered between garden design and floristry, eventually opting for floristry so that my passion for the garden didn’t get diminished by becoming my job. And so it was that I started my own floral design business - Firenza Floral Design (later Firenza Flowers) which thrived for twenty years.

After a traumatic year of family bereavement combined with my busiest year by far, a further change was needed - either I embraced the success of the business and went much bigger or I scaled back - I chose the latter.

During this time I was very honoured to have my garden featured in The English Garden Magazine.

english garden magazine feature

In 2012 at the peak of my wedding flower business, I started to grow a few herbs and flowers to use in my work, which by then was entirely large weddings.

[For context, the vast majority of flowers sold in the UK are imported and back then choosing to use self-grown materials was both unusual and I’m afraid was pretty much laughed at by my most of my peers - they’ve actually told me since, and they’ve since embraced it too!]

I started sourcing locally grown flowers from artisan growers, at a time when there were almost no small-scale cut flower growers in the UK. It was also around this time that I had my eyes opened to the fact that the florist ‘staple’ floral foam was in fact a single use plastic - each brick breaking down into millions of tiny toxic micro-plastics, to be inhaled dry by the user or released into the water system when wet.

A pioneer of foam-free installations I relished discovering new ways of working, ways to create the large pieces I’ve always made. It turns out I have a real knack for solving the problem of making that happen and for years I have taught foam-free designs around the world.

I remain a passionate advocate of working naturally and sustainably. There are now many florists using locally grown flowers and foam free mechanics and it gives me great pleasure to see some of my ‘out there’ and often Heath Robinson techniques being embraced far and wide for large scale designs.

I’ve honed my offering along the way and have been lucky enough to attract clients who just love my work and trust me to design to my own brief - unable to fully articulate what they would get until it was created.

This is the sweet spot, I’m free to let me imagination run riot and the client gets something much more elevated and dramatic than they ever could have contemplated.

In summary

I embrace the wonk of a stem grown by myself, don’t touch floral foam and work with natural elements and indulge my passion for materials that others look past

“ … focusing on lesser known flowers that have been grown in Britain for centuries”