TIFFANIE TURNER's FINE ART OF PAPER FLOWERS
olde orchard farmhouse : workshop details
NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED
DAY 1 : saturday, june 22
Early Afternoon:
Participants arrive at noon for check in and settling into the farmhouse. A community lunch will be served, allowing for everyone to get to know their surroundings and each other, Following lunch, we’ll make our way into the barn for the workshop orientation and introductions.
Late Afternoon:
We will jump right in to paper flower making, learning the materials as we go. We will start with the tiniest of flowers, petite Apple Blossoms that we will eventually add to the apple tree branches we make. Towards the end of this workshop day, Tiffanie will talk a little bit about different types of peonies, and we will create showy centers for a type of "Single" Peony selected by Tiffanie. If time allows, we will begin to create the peony petals, and will be completing the flower on Monday afternoon.
DAY 2 : SUNDAY, JUNE 23
Morning:
After a delicious breakfast, we will walk as a group through the orchard adjacent to our barn workshop space, collecting leaf, branch and baby apple specimens if available to work from over the remainder of the day. Tiffanie will discuss paper foliage basics as they relate to their natural counterparts, and then we will head inside for a paper staining and coloring lesson and demonstration.
Plant Foliage can be the centerpiece or just the beautiful finishing touch for a paper flower. This session will be devoted to learning and practicing basic leaf concepts and creating leaves we will need for the flowers we are making, with some tips on making your leaves change with the season. Specific instructions will be given for apple, dahlia, and peony leaves and leaf stems, as well as for baby apples, and closed dahlia buds.
We will enjoy our lunch while we begin a candid/open conversation surrounding how we each seek balance in our creative, work, and personal lives. Let us discuss what works and how we juggle to find meaningful time for ourselves.
Afternoon:
Time goes more quickly than one could imagine when making friends and paper flowers. We will use this large swath of the afternoon to continue working on various Apple Tree Branch elements and assembling them together, as well as completing a few dahlia and peony leaves to add to our flowers on Monday.
Evening:
After this Sunday afternoon session, relax, freshen up, and join us if you'd like at The New Woodshed next door for an optional group dinner.
DAY 3 : MONDAY, JUNE 24
Morning:
Departing by car to nearby Castle in the Clouds, we will enjoy a brisk morning hike, guided by Tiffanie's dear friend Michel Prause, a lifelong resident of the area. To-go coffee, tea and fruit will be provided at the farmhouse before the hike, followed by breakfast.
This morning's work will be the special fringing elements and precise styling of the striking Open-Centered Single Dahlia. Tiffanie will take you through the creation of the open center, and teach you to make the petals out of German crepe paper in colors of your choice.
Afternoon:
After lunch, we will begin our last afternoon session by learning the finishing details of the open-centered single dahlia, followed by assembling and finish our Single Peonies. Tiffanie will stay available after this session for anyone who might want to work later or has additional questions.
DAY 4 : TUESDAY, JUNE 25
Morning:
After our last breakfast together, Tiffanie will spend the morning providing materials and instruction on how to create a paper Dandelion, something she first created at Olde Orchard Farm during a residency there several summers ago. You can follow along with this dandelion lesson, or if you prefer you can work independently to add final touches to your earlier work.
Working as a team, we will photograph the "fruits" of our labor against the many rustic, beautiful surfaces the barn and farmhouse provide. This photo shoot is such a wonderful time to honor our hard work and the beauty we will have created, and provide a way to spread this beauty out into the world.
Afternoon:
We will take a moment to put some closure on our retreat together. We will provide boxed lunches to enjoy on site or on your way out of town. Please note that guest rooms are available to you until 5:00 p.m., so if you can plan to stay and relax a little more or enjoy the Lakes Region, please do.
Please note:
Daily schedules and workshop content are subject to small changes to accommodate our group's pace and progress. Tiffanie is always working on new flowers, and may choose to substitute one item in the program if she finds sharing a new flower would be beneficial.
TIFFANIE TURNER
papelsf.com
Tiffanie Turner was born in 1970 in Colonie, NY and raised in the woods of New Hampshire. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1995 and worked as an architect for over 15 years before beginning her career as a botanical sculptor. She received a Zellerbach Family Grant award in 2016 to support her work as the May 2016 artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum located in San Francisco, where she has resided for over 20 years.
Turner has had solo exhibitions at the Kimball Gallery at the de Young Museum, Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, MA, and at Rare Device in San Francisco, where she hung her first solo show titled "HEADS" in 2014. Recent group exhibitions include "Beyond the Bouquet" at the Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens in southern California, “Flower Power” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, “Preternatural” at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, “Detritus” at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and “Botanica” at Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA. She has been featured in Vogue, American Craft, O Magazine, Sunset, Flower Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and been noted online by Colossal, Squarespace presents HI-FRUCTOSE, Architectural Digest, My Modern Met, Design*Sponge, Elie Saab, and The Jealous Curator, among others.
Turner is an instructor in the art of paper flower making across the United States and beyond, and is the author of The Fine Art of Paper Flowers, released in August 2017. She is looking forward to her next solo exhibition of large scale work with Eleanor Harwood Gallery at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco in early 2019.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a botanical sculptor who depicts the appearance of different plants, mostly flowers, to some degree of accuracy, in paper, using both realism and preternaturally large, sometimes metastasized forms. My works in paper study scale, texture (petals sometimes reading like feathers, or fur) and color. I work with the rhythms and patterns found in nature, as well as the missteps and irregularities caused by decay, rot, wilt, dormancy, death, and genetic and viral mutations like phyllody, petalody and fasciation. I like to bring the smallest things we take for granted or that might go unnoticed, like the shape of the smallest floret of a flower, right to the viewer’s face, when one may realize they never knew it at all. I like to use the accessible association of botany to tell stories of the state of our environment, of the limits of our society's tolerance of fading beauty, of human vanity and of human compassion.
