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 was the 2021 recipient of the $25,000 Pirkle Jones Fund Visual Artist Support Program Grant., and 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 resided for over 20 years before moving to Marin County with her family in 2018.

Turner has had solo exhibitions at the Kimball Gallery at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, MA, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation, and Rare Device Gallery, all in San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include In Bloom: Flowers in Contemporary Art, Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, CA (upcoming); Crocker-Kingsley Juried Exhibition, Blue Line Arts, Roseville, CA; GROW, Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA; Paper Show, Heron Arts, San Francisco, CA; Informing Memory: Process, Place, and Notion, Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH; Sometimes Things Come Together, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, S.F., CA; NSFW/Femme at Spoke Art in San Francisco, CA; Orchids: Attraction and Deception at Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, VA; Lush at Hashimoto Contemporary in NYC; Beyond the Bouquet at Descanso Garden's Sturt Haaga Gallery in Southern California; Flora at the Cornell Art Museum in Delray Beach, FL; 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 The New York Times, The New York Times T Magazine and the NYT Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, Sunset Magazine, Vogue, American Craft Magazine, O Magazine, Phaidon Press’s “The Rose Book” and “Flower”, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been noted online by The New York Times T Magazine, Vice Creator's Project, Architectural Digest, Colossal, Gardens Illustrated, My Modern Met, Design*Sponge, Elie Saab, and The Jealous Curator, among others.

Turner is an instructor in the art of paper flower making in the United States and beyond, and her first book, The Fine Art of Paper Flowers, was released on Ten Speed Press in August 2017. She was represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco from 2018 until leaving in 2025.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My sculptures depict the appearance of different plants, mostly the heads of flowers, to some degree of accuracy, in paper, combining realism with preternaturally large, sometimes metastasized forms. Through my works in paper I study scale, texture (petals sometimes reading like feathers, or fur) and color. Each piece can take between two to four months of around the clock work to complete. I work with the rhythms and patterns found in nature, as well as the wonderful gestures formed by missteps and irregularities in nature like 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 smallest florets of a flower, right to the viewer’s face, when one may realize they never knew them at all. The past few years have also found me wading through the physicality of deeply feminine blooms like roses, where I invite further discussion of gender and feminism through the full, overt presentation of a flower’s inner parts.

I am moved deeply and innately by the specimens found in nature, the dynamism of a flower on the stem and in the vase, changing with the season or by the day, here one month then gone for the next eleven. Through the exhibition of my work, teaching, and public residencies, I have learned that the familiarity and accessibility of flowers and plants allows an “easy” in for people, and when the viewer is drawn to the subject matter, it opens up numerous conversations and interpretations of the work. Using this accessible nature of botany, I have been able to create works of enlarged realism that talk about conceptual issues and can be interpreted differently from person to person, which I find so exciting. In the past, my work has opened up dialogues that test the limits of our tolerance for fading beauty, and of human vanity, human compassion, and human caused destruction, and has told stories of the state of our environment, as well as the state of the modern human psyche. My paper sculptures have studied things like narcissism, overshadowing and being overshadowed, the experience of loss in growing older and losing one’s youth, becoming invisible, and the painful time in which you realize all of this is happening. But my work has also advocated for finding the beauty of aging and what happens when you find yourself on the other side of that surreal process, when older people look more beautiful to you, and you can relate to them more, and you can see the good in being older. If we can find such magnetism in a rotting ranunculus or rose, as people seem to do with my work, can we still feel that for a person with age spots and jowls? I am currently creating a new body of work titled “American Grown” which will build on my past work with new concepts and thoughts I’ve had over the past two years, with an emphasis on the idea of bridging the gap between the culture I grew up in and the culture I want my children to grow up in. A realist/surrealist memory of being a latchkey kid who is now an unapologetic helicopter parent, and why that may be.

My work is informed greatly by my knowledge as an architect of construction and how things are put together. I draw inspiration of process from artists such as Tom Friedman and Lee Bontecou, and inspiration of content by the beauty and distress found in our declining natural environment. I am forever studying the paintings of 16th and 17th century Dutch master painters, the botanical work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the bizarre and repulsive yet undeniably masterful work of contemporary painter Christian Rex Van Minnen. I have been drawn to concepts of food in art recently, and I hope to process that in my upcoming works as well.

I want my work to exist in the realm of vanitas, as the world is fraught as much as ever with the destructive nature of discovery, conquest, and capitalism. It spreads so far and wide, through our disappearing environments, and comes too close to home with our medical afflictions, continued societal oppressions and shocking violence. But I can use the asymmetrical movement of an inexplicably large and somehow distressed or deformed head of a flower to tell the tales of the beauty and transience of life, and the perfect, gigantic head of a flower to offer some hope, too.

Top photo by Aya Brackett.