SOPHIE REES

Central to the work is my passion for botanicals, using the contents of my garden and locally foraged specimens as inspiration for the paintings. Whilst these flowers are the starting point for my paintings, they are not portraits of bouquets. They are compositions built from memory, observation and imagination, where individual blooms become characters in a larger conversation about colour, rhythm and the passing of time.

Rooted in the long tradition of botanical and floral painting. I am interested in the history of flowers as subjects—from seventeenth-century still lifes and botanical studies to decorative arts and textiles—but rather than documenting plants with scientific precision or symbolic intent, I use them as a language for exploring emotion, memory and the act of looking. The paintings acknowledge this rich history while allowing it to evolve into something that is more playful and personal. I collect flowers from my garden and allotment as they move through the seasons. Rather than arranging them according to botanical accuracy, I allow them to shift and reassemble into impossible bouquets. Familiar flowers sit alongside imagined forms, creating spaces where memory becomes more important than documentation.

The paintings celebrate the expressive possibilities of colour. Saturated backgrounds of crimson, chartreuse, lavender and deep umber create emotional atmospheres rather than realistic settings. The vase provides a quiet anchor while the flowers expand beyond it, reaching towards the edges of the paper with a spontaneous energy. Patterned ceramics, decorative surfaces and flattened perspectives draw as much from textile design, folk traditions and modern painting as they do from historical still life.

Alongside painting, Interior design, ceramics and textiles are an integral part of my practice; the relationship between artwork and the spaces we inhabit. I think of these works not simply as images but as objects that live within a room, where colour, scale and pattern enter into conversation with architecture, furniture, textiles and light. I am interested in the way a painting can transform an interior and, equally, how an interior can shape the experience of a painting. This dialogue between artwork and environment informs many of my decisions, from palette and composition to the physical presence of the work on the wall. Working on paper is central to the process. The paintings retain the irregular edges of the sheet, revealing the object as something handmade rather than concealed behind an illusion of perfection. Layers of paint, pastel and drawing remain visible, allowing decisions, revisions and the physical act of making to become part of the finished work. I want the surface to feel immediate—alive with marks that record both confidence and uncertainty.

Ultimately, I hope they invite viewers to slow down and notice the extraordinary complexity found in ordinary things: the curve of a stem, the architecture of a seed head, the unexpected harmony between unlikely colours. Each bouquet is an imagined gathering—a celebration of beauty that is fleeting, imperfect and continually renewed.