Encounter Rebecca Louise Law’s extraordinary floral installation

Some 250,000 preserved and fresh flowers and foliage have filled a gallery at Compton Verney Art Gallery, in an extraordinary new installation by artist Rebecca Louise Law. Arts Society Lecturer and gallery curator Dr Amy Orrock takes us behind the scenes.

Installation shot, Seasons at Compton Verney

With masses of flowers suspended from the ceiling on thousands of copper wires, an ambitious installation called Seasons has gone up at Compton Verney; its subtitle is ‘a journey through nature’. Winding around and filling one of the gallery spaces, it takes viewers on an experiential voyage through the year: opening with spring, before looping almost full circle through summer, autumn and winter. 

Installation shot, Seasons at Compton Verney

THE ARTIST AND HER MEDIUM 

Law’s choice of medium is no accident. She can trace six generations of gardeners in her family. Growing up close to a National Trust estate, she describes a childhood filled with nature, learning about horticulture from her father, who was head gardener at Anglesey Abbey. She believes that flowers are the ultimate gift of the natural world. ‘Playing’ and a wonder in nature are core to her practice. While studying Fine Art she became frustrated by her inability to accurately represent the sublime qualities of nature on canvas. Inspired by installation art, she swapped paint for flowers, acquiring knowledge of her medium by working for a florist. By 2003 she was using flowers as paint and space as canvas. 

Law’s installations combine an epic sense of scale with a harmonious sense of place. The Canopy (2016) is a permanent work inside a Melbourne mall, with 150,000 blooms from Australia’s Yarra region suspended over shoppers’ heads. For Banquet (2019) at La Roche-Jagu, a medieval French banqueting hall was filled with 15,000 flowers to evoke the sensory pleasures of a feast, using Normandy flowers close to medieval species. 

Community, 2018, Toledo Museum of Art

A DIARY AND A VISION 

Seasons was commissioned before the onset of the pandemic, but recent events have made the project more resonant. Lockdowns grounded Law at her home in Snowdonia, giving her ‘the gift of time’. Inspired by painter Mary Newcomb, whose work is also on show at the gallery, Law decided to keep a 2020 nature diary, writing, drawing and preserving aspects of the natural world in notebooks. She has also kept a daily Instagram diary (@rebeccalouiselawdiary), capturing moments as the months change. Begun in November 2019, these diaries span a period during which people found solace in nature on their doorsteps: micro and macroworlds intertwined. 

Running alongside Law’s diary insights is a vision of nature that is as expansive and inclusive as her art. Core to her practice is community involvement. ‘I make installations to enable people to interact with nature, to give time to observe and be moved by the beauty of creation,’ she states. Volunteers are regularly drafted in to help facilitate her work at the final stages. Her largest installation to date, Community (Toledo Museum of Art, 2019), contained 520,000 elements, each individually wired into garlands with the help of 1,000 volunteer hours. Law’s commitment to collaborative making as a means of facilitating engagements with nature is part of what makes working with her so exciting. 

SEE

Rebecca Louise Law: Seasons

Compton Verney, until 30 August

comptonverney.org.uk

An extended version of this feature originally appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of The Arts Society magazine, available exclusively to Members and Supporters.