This face of flowers has haunted me for years, I am fascinated by the loveliness which is coupled with the unease I feel every time I see it – delighting in the delicious idea of a face made of flowers but this looks more like a tattoo, it’s scary. Arcimboldo, court painter in 16th century Vienna, is widely acknowledged to be the father of surrealism; he made ‘likenesses’ of people from all manner of objects, a librarian’s face made of his books, a cook’s portrait in a dish of food, today modern advertising still use the same clever devices to spectacular visual effects.

So I decided to make a face of embroidered flowers picked from my own garden ( as you do). I started with a collage to see what I would need to find to make it convincing, the man’s face in the bottom left corner is also by Arcimboldo, a portrait of his patron Rudolph ll as Vertumnus,the god of the harvest 1590.(You can also see my version of a Vegetable Man). I had to resort to all sorts of flowers to make the face – but the expression of vague alarm on this first face of flowers should have warned me what was coming……….I started to draw the flowers from my garden, searching out  roses for cheeks, pansy eyes, rosebud mouth…how innocent it all was; by the end of this embroidery I had more many ideas due to my research both visiting flower shows and studying the history of Florists – the growers, showers and  developers of our modern day flowers. Slowly the work became a whole series of embroideries about man’s manipulation of nature with beautiful and terrible results……….however to start at the very beginning.

This is the vase of flowers that I used for the drawing above, the pansy eyes, the foxglove nose and eyebrow, the carnation mouth are faithfully recorded, not exactly in the same spaces – but if you squint the face can just be seen in the bunch below left. But I had a problem – I didn’t have the right flowers to use in my garden to develop this further so some more would have to be bought.

I had put them in a lovely old (and mended) hand blown glass decanter and this made me think of the beautiful Dutch paintings of vases of flowers – it was studying these closely that made me realise that none of these actual painted bouquets ever existed, they were portraits of individual flowers painted when they were in season and assembled by the artists  – how else do you get tulips with fully blown roses with ears of corn with anemones all in one vase – in the 17th century.

Now I knew how to get what I needed, I designed the face and searched for flowers to fill in the features. I drew each flower as I found it, embroidered it on dark silk organza ready to be cut out and assembled when I had enough  – this took several months. I started with a drawing of Iris from my garden – I knew she (by now she had become Flora, the Roman goddess of spring) had to have my colour hair, this iris was perfect a sort of reddish blonde. In the drawing I have recorded the striations of colour so that I can develop my stitches in the same directions.

I picked, drew and sampled all the flowers I could find, it was a lovely summer of work. Friends and neighbours started to bring me flowers they thought I would like to include, the search was on for  all sorts of auburn and orange flowers for the hair,

flesh coloured roses and poppies for the skin, rosebuds for the mouth.

Slowly, by  travelling around to see specialist flower shows and drawing from all kinds of resources I pieced together the face; the pastel drawing I worked from and the ongoing recorded collage can also be seen below.

So now this face had to have a body, the old glass decanter was perfect, with a swelling rounded shape and elegant proportions, easy enough to draw, but how do I embroider it?

Placing tracing paper over the drawing to get a pattern for the vase I suddenly realised this was how to achieve the effect of seeing stalks though water and glass, I painted the stalks on silk with dye then bonded embroidered silk organza onto the surface –

I lost most of the painting in the process but the effect is both subtle and sinks into the black ground and so does not distract from Flora’s stupendous poppy breasts.

So here she is in all her splendour. But she is short lived; surrounded by things that will harm and ultimately destroy her, the rose-cutter bee will eat her cheeks, the butterfly will lay eggs and the larvae will feed from her, the beautiful beetle feeds off rose leaves and the snail will first slime then devour her. Only her beauty spot, the lady bird, will protect her – from greenfly.

Winter flowering pansies are in the shops now, but I have a set of embroidered pansies in flower all year round…the Pansy Faces from the Flora Embroideries.

So just how did the rust and gold pansy on the left turn into the tiger below? I will try and show you.

Visiting the many different flower shows whilst researching The Flora, I was struck by the way the pansies were displayed – they are arranged separately in trays, not as the usual bunch of flowers in a vase, but just the heads placed poking out of a board on a tray – why? I like to think that it really makes you look carefully at the difference in each wonderful flower head; but I suspect it may be because one of the criteria for a show pansy is to try to grow the petals to form a perfect circle. Then “heads” and “pansy faces” came together in my mind, so I started to photograph the trays at all the shows I visited, as you can see below the standard of presentation is often patchy and there seems to be no attempt at colour co-ordination!

I fantasised that if I could breed flowers I would develop the pansies further by changing the shapes of the petals and regulating their colours. I tried also to keep the changes to a minimum to show the stages  of metamorphoses from flower to face. You can see that in the drawing below I started with a butterfly. which was fairly easy, and then moved onto the owl..he was a bit trickier and the problem of making this metamorphosis became apparent – whilst drawing and inventing from the research everything was clear,  but whilst stitching the flowers/birds/ animals my mind became confused between whether I was stitching an ear or a petal…..and this got more confusing as I developed the series.

I then developed the cat or tiger;  the stripes were fascinating to depict as they could follow through the growth patterns of the petals  and it was a delight to invent and stitch, as was the monkey – the dog was not made – if I could have drawn a wire fox terrier as  pansy I would have included him that but I could only manage a shitzu – I have  always thought of them as pansy faced dogs.

I then decided that this was all too innocent, while I was happily playing and exercising total control over  inert materials – the plant breeders and agricultural scientists were not. What would happen if it all went horribly horribly wrong? The ultimate goal for mankind seems to be to become like god and make make everything for our own benefits and in our own likeness. This was  hard decision to make  and I knew from the start that I would have to eventually develop a human face; I at first thought it could be a nice face – another beauty like Flora and the Edible Woman.

But really all along I had known it had to be a self portrait to make sense of my idea. I first appear drawn in grey pencil amongst my lovely colourful animals and fairy faces – and yes I do recognise that it is a sign of vanity – but I have never ever liked to see pictures of  myself. Friends have learned not to show me any photographs they have taken of me – I rip the heads off them – I want only to be known by the images in my work – so a control freak as well…I know I know.

But back to the plot – below is a page of  drawings for the final pansy face, a horrid version of me …

This is Harvest Festival time and in celebration of the season I am featuring the Edible Woman, alternatively The Prize.  She is a member of  the Flora Embroideries and was first imagined as a mate to The Giant Vegetable Man in the Flower Show blog. He had to have a mate made for him, even though he is pug-ugly, it would be sad to let all that male vitality and virility go to waste.

The first idea I had for her was as an earth goddess, all burgeoning breasts and stomach, lascivious and wanton…a good match for him. I made several drawings but couldn’t bring myself to actually embroider them; she was not to be a figure of ribald humour like him and I did not want her to be sniggered at in the giant vegetable show .

The  breeders and exhibitors of flowers and fruit for prizes, prefer perfection of form to any other consideration. So she had to have some sort of beauty and so I thought she  could possibly become an old man’s darling, kept for her beauty and breeding potential – a trophy wife. But as such she is vulnerable as is an edible woman.

I thought of the lovely dishes of fruit displayed at the local flower shows often arranged on paper lace doilies and also the bowls of water containing heads of flowers arranged in patterns so delicately displayed.

I then remembered that my mother used to win baskets of fruit at the local whist drives when I was a child. She would invariably come home with either a bottle of sweet sherry or more often a wonderful exotic basket of fruit. Well the basket was exotic, a large straw affair – what I now call a “lady basket” – which had to be given back the next week; it was always tied with a ribbon on the handle and the various fruits culled from village gardens were made valuable by the beautiful presentation –  a proper prize.

My lady was beginning to take shape in my mind, but how to make her face from edible things?I bought some exotic fruit and tried to arrange them into a face – this was not easy, the first attempt was really dreadful, like a fat unhappy drunk pumpkin woman, the only things that worked were the 5 okra as ladies fingers and the pomegranate and persimmon looked hopeful as breasts…….

But I decided to sort it out by drawing..I would work with what I could and let the rest take shape around this, while stitching samples I had plenty of time to think.

I don’t remember when I decided to make the fingers from asparagus, I know why though, they look more like painted pink fingernails. The painted silk is shown below above another edible personification, but who would want to marry her?

So here she is – my Prize – the Edible Woman in all her glory; displayed for your delectation in a ruched fabric marquee, usually reserved for weddings but often used for the classier northern England flower shows. You could eat all of her, from her apple cheeks to her cherry lips, dip her asparagus fingers into melted butter and nibble you way through the sweet salad flowers of her hair; scrunch your teeth through her pear nose while contemplating her dark nipples before you peel your way into her luscious ripe breasts……

Now here’s a challenge – would any of the cooks out there like to concoct a recipe from her, or for her,  maybe a menu would be easier….the asaparagus doesn’t lend itself to inclusion in fruit salads – but then what do I know? I don’t cook puddings I only ever embroider them.

This is the season for flower shows in England and here in Somerset there are lots to visit,  so last Saturday I went to a neighbouring village, Tickenham, just to see how it compares to the Portishead show – which is the best in the district and had inspired a set of embroideries which I made some time ago…. more of which later.

When I arrived the first view was of the small marquee set in a field with lots of other tents and awnings with stalls selling things, a brass band played, there were queues for ice creams, cream teas and home-made cakes – so far so good.

I really like the shows in marquees the best – the air smells of flowers and crushed grass and the light inside is perfect for enhancing the exhibits. Sometimes at the posh flower – arranging shows such as Harrogate in Yorkshire, they hire wedding marquees which have draped walls of ruched fabrics…but plain canvas gives the best light.

Although the main point of these shows are the vegetable and flower competitions, I prefer the other stuff; children’s gardens on a plate or  seed tray;

surreal faces and animals made from vegetables. But  My Grandad at the head of the blog only received a third prize – what do the judges think they are doing? The display that won – and it was excellent – was praised for being “simple and effective” – but who wants ‘simple and effective’ on a wet Saturday afternoon at a flower show – we want exuberance, competition, prizes for fun, colour, imagination and originality. In all the many shows I visited I have never before seen a child’s vegetable portrait.

So when I went to the shows for inspiration I wasn’t looking for “refined” I was looking for ideas and arguments about how we manipulate the natural world for our own benefits  and as I saw the baskets of vegetables and those marrows on Saturday,  I remembered my own versions of these exhibits.

I went to the giant vegetable show in Lincolnshire where I had expected to just see larger versions of the above…but there was something else going on.

The marquees where hot and humid but the smell was of rotting vegetation, huge marrows and mis-shapen pumpkins often carved with names, it made us think we had wandered into a vegetable porn show. My original idea of a sort of giant Green Man was replaced by a lecherous freak of nature –  and it was so obvious that everyone else saw what we saw and were comparing these vegetables to body “parts”.

I think you can see where I was heading………

The drawing for the vegetable man above was constructed from various vegetables exhibited at the show, all chosen for their grossness and sexual connotations. In the embroidery, below, I have put the man in a booth with a curtain that can be drawn aside, a convention of the popular freak shows in 18th and 19th century Britain. He holds a packet of birth control pills; apparently one grower had stolen his wife’s pills  because they had made her retain water and put on weight  – so he mashed them up as a liquid feed for his Heaviest Marrow exhibit – honestly this is true, I invented nothing for any of the embroideries in this collection, I merely re – arranged the visual facts.  Below, the onlookers are being enveloped by a marauding cabbage.

But to get back to the Tickenham show and the wrongful distribution of prizes. Can you believe that this hand puppet only made third prize in Class 184 – for 8-11 years inclusive – “Anything you like – you made it, let’s see it”?  I think he has such presence and holds the true spirit of Mr Punch that he is in a class of his own.

In future blogs there will be more stories from the flower shows which gave rise to The Flora Embroideries.