The English Woman’s Flora

The exhibition explores the beauty of Britain’s vanishing wildflowers. It takes place as part of Somerset Art Weeks 2019.

Fiona Hingston’s new body of work, ‘The English Woman’s Flora’, includes more than 200 wildflowers made from masking tape and graphite. It is based on popular pocketbook ‘The Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers‘ (W.J. Stokoe, 1957). The work is part celebration and part lament for what is and increasingly is not to be found on the land she calls home.

For twenty years, Fiona has recorded aspects of the landscape. Through drawing, photography, found objects and book works. She lives and works in a village on the edge of the Mendip Hills. And sees her practice as a slow archaeological enquiry into place and the passage of time.

Over the past few years, her observations have become disrupted by the growing awareness of a quiet erosion. Silent barns, decaying farm buildings, monoculture crops and vanishing flora and fauna. She sees this local loss as directly connecting to wider issues of commercial standardisation and a diminishing of both environmental and cultural diversity.

Read the full press release.