After many years of creating floral designs and environments at my San Francisco store, Floréal, I began the process of closing shop and shifting gears. I have often regretted the ephemeral nature of working with fresh flowers, and as I began digging through my extensive collection of dried flowers and foliage, I found inspiration. Ever the creator, my idle hands and eyes cast towards a new medium for my compositions.

Building on memories of long walks in the fields and woods of Provence, where beautiful gardens were filled with colorful birds, insects and the like, I began collages that I thought of as my mother’s imaginary gardens. When the pandemic hit and we all began wearing masks, I was building the collages on a base of old-world portraits, allowing only the eyes to be exposed, surrounded by flora and fauna that was clipped and altered from historical art and nature books. That original series now seems prescient after our months of masking and Covid. Masked, the eyes were truly our only “window to the soul.”

 The many years of using fresh flowers as sculptural elements have trained my eye to compose these collaged details from art history and natural history. The combined elements become something both steeped in the past and full of surprises.

In the most recent works, the faces have become fully visible anchors, and reflect a kind of rebirth as we begin to bloom ourselves after isolation.

My signature is hidden – it is a genuine four-leaf clover. The clover is not easy to find in nature either, but if you look carefully, it will reveal itself.

During the height of the pandemic, one of my collages, titled “Versailles,” was selected by the De Young Museum of San Francisco for exhibition in their “OPEN” curated show, which celebrated current Bay Area artists and their work.                                                                                    

Dominique Pfahl