A living art
Creating installations for film, fashion shows, campaigns and celebrity events in London, the Irish founders of creative floral design studio Worm are helping to transform floristry from a humble trade into an innovative art form, explains Marie Kelly.
I’d say many a business plan has been hatched over a good Sunday dinner and a couple of pints of Guinness. Fittingly, it was in a pub on Columbia Road, the location of London’s most famous flower market, that Terri Chandler and Katie Smyth made the impromptu decision “after a few drinks” to enrol in a flower course and start a business. The former a jobbing actor from Cork, and Smyth, a film studies graduate from Dublin working as a freelance interiors stylist, listened to their pals laugh off the idea as “the Guinness talking”. Now six years on, the friends’ east London floral design studio, called Worm, is at the forefront of conceptual and sustainable floristry in the UK.
There was a time when floristry was viewed as a cutesy craft, a ‘feminine’ pursuit created within a domestic realm rather than a legitimate artistic pursuit. It was perceived as decorative not intellectual, so therefore didn’t qualify as ‘serious’ art. But most of the florists Chandler and Smyth know in London are artists who’ve simply changed medium. Ruth Monahan of Irish company Appassionata Flowers tells me that her entire team is made up of second-career florists: “Everyone brings other experiences in design and the environment to Appassionata, and it’s this exposure to alternative forms of design and other artistic disciplines that has evolved floristry from a static formal trade to an innovative art form.”
Floristry also underwent an image overhaul, Chandler tells me, when fashion brand Rodarte accessorised its models with elaborate floral crowns in 2017 for its spring/summer 2018 runway show. “At that show the flowers were as important as the fashion,” she recalls. Fellow Corkonian Tess Casey, founder of Aisling Flowers, the New York-based florist which specialises in arrangements and installations for film and TV, and whose credits include Sex and the City, And Just Like That…, Netflix drama Halston and Oscar-nominated The Post, explains that in New York, it was the 2015 Met Gala that changed people’s perception of the industry.
About 250,000 white roses were used to create a giant Chinese urn which stood 30-foot tall in the centre of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall. “This is where floral installations started,” says Casey. “Later that year, Dior created a blue delphinium mountain at the Louvre for its SS16 runway show. It was then that floristry started to attract artists, and that it was considered a serious medium by the art world.” Today it’s a “bazillion dollar industry,” reveals Casey.
Chandler and Smyth may not be bazillionaires, but their client list suggests they’re at the pinnacle of their industry. It’s an impressive roll call of fashion heavyweights like Burberry, Simone Rocha, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and industry stalwarts such as the Chelsea Flower Show, the Garden Museum and Bloom. They’ve collaborated with the likes of event stylist Fiona Leahy and former Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers, styled the flowers for chef Clodagh McKenna’s wedding, created installations for the two-Michelin-star restaurant The Clove Club and devised table flowers for Yotam Ottolenghi’s book launch. And it all began with an adult education Level 1 course in floristry one day a week.
“It was a really inexpensive course, which taught us about conditioning, arranging and treating flowers,” explains 38-year-old Chandler, “but it didn’t cover styling, which was a really good thing because it allowed us to go with our instincts.” Chandler says she and Smyth fell into a style really easily, describing the Worm aesthetic as wild and organic, reflective of the coastlines of Ireland where both women grew up and the gardens they played in as children, which were full of haphazard grasses and wayward stems. “My Dad’s garden is on a cliff in Cove,” says Chandler, “and everything that grows there is blown in,” she explains. Chandler agrees there’s a nice irony about an aesthetic that has captured the imagination of London’s most fashionable being born out of the randomness of an Irish country garden.
Chandler says she and Smyth fell into a style really easily, describing the Worm aesthetic as wild and organic, reflective of the coastlines of Ireland where both women grew up and the gardens they played in as children
Setting up in Chandler’s Hackney flat and working evening and weekend jobs in restaurants to subsidise themselves, they began by doing the flowers for those eateries and for weddings held at them. They had no marketing tools at their disposal other than Instagram, but because the social media platform is such an aesthetic app – “flowers just work on it” – the business and its online community grew quickly and the friends were soon being asked to create displays for large occasions. “We both had backgrounds working in film and theatre, so we were used to being under pressure in stressful environments,” says the soon-to-be mum of two. They gave it a go and “caught the bug” for large-scale events and today the majority of their commissions require substantial and imaginative installations.
Like any other art form, floral design is about narrative and storytelling. In the 2019 book Bláthanna, which Monahan co-wrote, she and her colleagues showcased beautifully how floristry and art have merged in recent years by creating a series of “floral short stories” across the Irish landscape. “We hung a kaleidoscopic giant gypsophila swing on a yew walk, brought a garden inside a drawing room, and installed a pink moongate on some sand dunes in Sligo,” she explains. “As floral artists, we’ve always believed in synchronicity, and that flowers can soften, subtly shape and add finish to interiors and architecture just as a traditional piece of sculpture or painting might. In a similar fashion, the colour, form, texture, and volume of flowers follows, and elaborates on, the traditional tenets of design.”
During the pandemic in New York, floral storytelling was employed for more pragmatic purposes, according to Casey. “There was a trend in the city for elaborate floral arches outside restaurants, as they projected a narrative of joy and optimism at a really difficult time, while also highlighting that the restaurant doors were open again.” For Chandler and Smyth, the jobs that involve a meaningful message are the ones that really appeal. One of their most memorable was a 2018 commission from the charity Maternity Action to create a structure that would highlight maternity and pregnancy discrimunation in the UK. The pair built an incredible spherical structure near Tower Bridge in London using 54,000 white carnations (the original Mother’s Day flower) – one flower for every woman treated unfairly – which were then delivered to MPs at Westminster the following day with information about the campaign.
What happens to the flowers after an event is as important to the pair as the job itself. “Projects like this one, which inspire, should be responsible too,” explains Chandler. “Ensuring that the flowers have a second life beyond the installation is really important.” Similar to the fashion industry, floristry is undergoing a huge push towards sustainability. Chandler and Smyth won’t use floral foam (it’s non-biodegradable and non-recyclable) or aerosol sprays (to spray paint flowers), and they won’t create a step-and-repeat floral backdrop (these are built using floral foam for single-event photo ops and the flowers often wind up in landfill rather than in compost sites). They use natural dyes and deadstock fabrics and work with a local charity called Floral Angels, which repurposes flowers used at events into bouquets for elderly people in that area.
Monahan agrees sustainability is an enormously important part of what they do, and Appassionata prioritises minimising waste, ensuring all packaging is biodegradable and compostable, reducing water usage and buying as much as possible from Irish suppliers. She laments the loss of Dublin’s only flower market in Smithfield, which closed in 2019 – “With it disappeared a fresh flower community that existed for two centuries.” – but, like Chandler and Smyth, she’s captivated and inspired by our wild Irish landscape. “We have access to the most amazing foliage here in Ireland, including twigs, berries, lichen, moss and pine from Dublin, Clare, Kerry and Waterford. There’s also nothing better than Killowen-grown daffodils arriving in the door or lavender grown and dried in bunches from Wicklow.”
Sustainability has become a narrative in and of itself within floral art. Earlier this year, Chandler and Smyth designed an installation for the gates of the Chelsea Flower Show, choosing to use only the humble allium, but in all its forms, in an effort to show that it’s possible to be sustainable and to create something beautiful and interesting from just one thing. “We used bulbs, varieties of allium flowers, dried allium seed heads, onions and deadstock fabric hand-dyed using various onion skins. The intention was to show that flowers can have many ‘lives’ as well as being a metaphor for the beauty inherent in every stage of life.”
In other words, flowers don’t simply exist in the here and now of a particular installation, display or event, but have a life cycle, from seed to germination to decay. If contemporary art is intended to challenge those who experience it, then Chandler and Smyth succeeded with their ‘onion gateway’ in more ways than one. “The staff at the event were terrified it would be too stinky for the Queen, who was scheduled to drive through it that first day,” she laughs.
Originally published in Sunday Independent Life, September 2022