Tiffanie Turner ’88: The fine art of flowers

It was the paper as much as anything that really just lit me up,” Tiffanie Turner ’88 says of the Italian crepe paper that inspired her to begin making craft flowers in 2013. At the time, she was a practicing architect raising two young children and in search of materials to make a flower crown for a dance class she was taking in San Francisco. Discovering the delicate paper was a creative awakening.

“I started having epiphany after epiphany,” she says. “‘What if I built a big, peony-shaped piñata?’ Then I thought, ‘What if I hang this peony on the wall, and don’t bash it with a bat?’”

Turner had spent 15 years as an architect after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Prior to that, she attended the Academy, where she studied architecture with Art Instructor Nick Dawson. But now, flowers were all she could think about.

“I don’t think I had really ever given myself permission to be outwardly creative,” Turner says. “At first, making flowers was something to do when the kids were asleep. Then I began to feel that, wow, I could do this every single day for the rest of my life.”

Encouraged by her husband, David, she began applying her engineering skills to a new end: capturing the beauty, intricacy and intrinsic hope found in flowers.

Today, Turner’s dramatic creations adorn walls from coast to coast, including in her dining room in West Marin County, California, and the homes of art collectors and galleries. She has had several solo exhibitions in San Francisco and Massachusetts, and in 2017 published a book of her techniques, The Fine Art of Paper Flowers. She also regularly travels abroad to teach flower-making during residential retreats in France and the U.K.

This past fall, three of Turner’s large, statement-making flower sculptures were part of an exhibit called “GROW” at the Palo Alto Art Center. In one install-ment, two 3-foot-wide pink roses hung on the wall, one freshly budding and one with wilting petals, joined by three blue ribbon bows. Titled Soup to Nuts, it speaks to the stages of marriage over a lifetime, from the fresh, hopeful beginnings to the very end.

Turner says she “uses the accessibility of flowers to invite people in,” then incorporates natural irregularities through decay, wilt, dormancy and death to challenge viewers with ruminations on the human condition, ephemerality or the state of the environment. This creative process begins with a distinct conceptual moment.

“I’ll find a flower that I’m dying to make — some just speak to me,” she says. “Then I think: ‘What do I want to talk about? What does this flower remind me of?’ It’s a superimposition of concept, then flower, sometimes color and then form.”

Constructed primarily from papier-mâché, wood or metal rods, cardboard and glue, with layers of exotic crepe paper stained or dyed in natural hues, the blooms are arresting. With each petal deftly textured, colored and carefully draped into position, they are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing — but on an enormous scale. Turner emphasizes that the great unseen material in all her pieces is patience. “Each large-scale sculpture takes two to four months of around-the-clock work to complete,” she says. “There’s no immediate gratification in what I do.”

Finding enough time is always a challenge. By securing grants, selling her work and teaching, Turner has been able to afford the time to keep developing her art. In 2021, a $25,000 grant from the Pirkle Jones Fund helped her build a body of work over two and a half years. She named the collection “American Grown,” and mounted a show in the fall of 2023 at her home gallery in San Francisco, Eleanor Harwood. It then moved to Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation in early 2024. A career milestone, the exhibit explored themes of generational differences and American exceptionalism.

Turner is currently plotting her next exhibit. “Conceptually, I have a lot of ‘old work’ that I still want to do before I can move on to new ideas,” she says. “There is just an unbelievable amount of material to plumb, because there are so many beautiful flowers out there. And so many issues to talk about.”

This article was originally published in the Winter 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.