Flower arranging, at least in Britain, is generally regarded as the preserve of nice, middle class ladies in genteel provincial towns. But there’s another, more complex side to our floral culture – witness the piles of rotting tributes in Kensington Gardens after the death of the Princess of Wales, or the eerie fashion for roadside shrines on the sites of accidents and murders. Its this un-reconciled cultural gap that attracted artist Jyll Bradley to the world of floristry and which led to her continuing work Fragrant, a mixture of performance art, installation and good old-fashioned flower arranging that’s about to embark on an international adventure.
‘I’ve always been interested in artistic practice that falls outside the traditional art work’, says Bradley. ‘Flower Festivals have this very uncool image, but they have enormous potential as art installations and I wanted to revitalise that in some way. Flowers are culturally significant around the world. they’re mediators of emotion – we use them in celebration, as tokens of love, or in the context of death. They’re used in religious practice, or they’re used simply as decoration or personal adornment, to impress or seduce.
Bradley’s interest in the performance potential of flower arranging prompted her to contact the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies (NAFAS), and to explore her ideas in a series of events that led to a full-scale London flower festival in September 2003. Fragrant started life as a small scale work developed for Duckie, the south London gay arts collective, in 2002. ‘We hired St Peter’s, a High Anglican church in Vauxhall, and staged a flower arranging demonstration there with Gillian Poulain, one of NAFAS’s demonstrators. I worked with her as dramaturg, and encouraged her to tell stories as she was doing the arrangements, talking about things she would never normally have discussed in a demonstration – a tragic accident that her sister had, for instance, and how Gillian raised her children. It was quite shocking to see a lady in her seventies talking about these things, and how they informed her work with flowers.’
Independent producer Bill Gee attended the event and was particularly struck by the range and diversity of the audience at St Peters. Traditional flower arrangers rubbed shoulders with the local Caribbean community and the regualer Duckie crowd, as well as a mixture of artists and theatregoers. The live art audience thought Gillian was wonderfully theatrical, the Carinbbean audience fell in love with theb flowers, many of which came from the Caribbean and provided a strong link with their history. And the flower arranging audience took the technical side of things very seriously. It was a totally uncynical event, at which a unique mix of people came together through flowers. That was its politics if you like.’
The success of the first ‘Fragrant’ led Bradley and Gee to join forces to create ‘Fragrant 2003’. This major flower festival brought together a team of top-notch flower arrangers to interpret personal stories sourced through the parish of St Peter’s. The theme was ‘Dreams Come True’, says Bradley, ‘a universal concept that people responded to very personally. Nine people from the local community told us stories of dreams and ambitions that they’d had in their lives, and the flower arrangers used them as the basis for nine large-scale floral pieces.’ The stories were as diverse as the Fragrant audience. The church organist who wanted to be ordained as a priest, the woman from Jamaica who trained to become a nurse, the man who travelled to India to meet an old woman he sponsored through Help the Aged – all these stories were retold through the medium of flowers. Flower arrangements crowded the sanctuary and the entrance until St Peter’s was full, and, indeed, fragrant.
The opening night featured floral demonstrations, a contemporary floral dance by local schoolchildren, live music and a personal appearance by Julia Clements OBE, the 97-year old doyenne of British flower arranging, who pronounced Fragrant ‘the best flower festival I have even been to.’ On the following Saturday, Duckie hostess Amy Lame led groups of clubbers down the road to join the floral festivities at the church – and this was when things really got interesting. ‘A lot of the people hadn’t been in church for years, and it was at a time when there was a lot of discussion about homosexuality in the Church of England. It was a chance to talk to the clergy, ask questions and confront issues. It turned into a very emotional and cathartic evening. ‘ Things came to a fittingly strange climax at the 11 o’clock Sunday morning service – a service of thanksgiving for the flowers, which had also been advertised as a theatre event in London listings magazine Time Out. ‘Being High Anglican, it was theatrical in any case,’ says Bradley. ‘There was a lot of incense and wonderful shafts of light coming through the windows. The flowers looked wonderful.’
Bradley and Gee are now looking to take Fragrant out of his original British context and re-imagine it as a work of infinitely adaptable international potential. ‘We don’t want this to be seen as a ‘touring version’ of the show,’ says Gee. ‘what we’re doing is exploring links with other countries where there’s a strong flower culture, researching on the ground and responding.’ As a result of collaboration with the British Council’s arts manager in Colombia, Fragrant will be part of the immense flower festival in Medellin, Colombia’s second city and the centre of the country’s enormous flower trade, in August.
‘I’ll be using the same process that informed the London version of the show,’ says Bradley, ‘except that we will be drawing on the stories from the flower community – from workers who are employed to pick flowers in the fields, to the heads of flower export companies. Then we’ll work with members of the Garden Club of Medellin to interpret these stories through flowers. There has been a good response because there’s a strong tradition of flowers in Colombia that people see as a positive balance to a lot of negative images about their country.’