Meet the floral artist collected by everyone from Emma Watson to the Queen

Sam Fishwick meets Rebecca Louise Law, the floral artist with a rebellious spirit
Sam Fishwick1 November 2018

Rebecca Louise Law’s work is at times as breathless as it is breathtaking.

Dangling from a ladder, hanging thousands of flowers from copper wire in as little as 24 hours for her temporary exhibits, the go-to florist for royals, top brands and A-listers is often left with blisters on her hands from the speed of the work. Still, she says, the installations provide her with a sense of calm.

‘Floristry is about now,’ says the artist, 38, ‘but my work is more like putting nature on pause, where the viewer is held and suspended in time in this natural space.’

One of her works

In a way, Law wants to cheat death, with delicate pieces dwelling on fragility and mortality designed ‘to live forever’. She has kept and preserved every one of the million floral elements she has used in installations over her career, from decorative rose columns at Windsor Castle — a special gift to the Queen — to 4,000 blooms strung from the ceiling of the Vitra Campus at Art Basel (she uses a drying method to preserve them). There has been work for fashion brands Hermès, Tiffany & Co and Jo Malone, among others, transforming spaces into ‘living paintings’. Emma Watson bought one of her smaller ‘curiosities’; a skull with flowers in the eyes.

Dutch masters ‘My 2014 print series, Still Life, was inspired by the work of Dutch masters like Balthasar van der Ast. Growing up around Anglesey Abbey, the walls were hung with still lifes, and we were surrounded by memento mori, a reminder of the temporary nature of life. Even though flowers are my language, the shells in his painting were my first love. I used to spend hours collecting them, listening to the sea.’

Next up is a project with Veuve Clicquot, Rebels, the fourth instalment of the Widow Series, an annual event that pays homage to the founder of the house, Madame Clicquot.

In keeping with the lady’s iconoclastic principles, Law and other artists will transform the Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf on the South Bank into a ‘euphoric festival field’, transporting visitors to ‘the high without the high’. Welcome to her upside-down flower world.

A book given to Law by her grandmother of flowers she had pressed

Law’s childhood was little short of idyllic. She grew up in a thatched cottage in Lode, Cambridgeshire, surrounded by rolling fields of oxeye daisies with her three older brothers and one younger sister. Their back garden led into that of Anglesey Abbey, the Jacobean-style National Trust property where her father worked as an assistant gardener; her mother, a special-needs teacher who specialised in rural studies, was ‘obsessed with flowers’; her grandmother would make art by pressing flowers from her garden.

‘Flowers were always there, entwined as a celebration of life,’ she says. But they became her medium in 2003 after studying fine art at Newcastle University.

Cotton plants. ‘I’d just been on a trip to India and thought, no one really understands where cotton comes from, or what the plant looks like. So I ordered as many as I could afford and went out at 4am, putting them in Ravenscroft Park, opposite my old house, and walking away to let the public take them. Every house in Columbia Road now has one, so you’d think that would start a conversation.’

She has outgrown her Columbia Road studio and recently moved with her husband, Andrew, and newborn son, Alexander, to Snowdonia — ‘next to the sea, by the mountains’ — where she can see ‘the walls for the first time in years’. After 15 years among London’s thronging flower market, though, she misses ‘Christmas carols and mulled wine on Wednesdays in December’ and the ‘special hours’ walking the road early on Sunday mornings, when flower vendors have arrived but the crowds have yet to. And then, back to work. A rebel without a pause.

Veuve Clicquot Widow Series, Rebels, 15-17 November, at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf

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