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 fleeting nature of working with fresh flowers.

Always the creator, my idle hands and eyes turned toward a new medium for my compositions. Flowers provide a direct sensory experience-encompassing petals, stems, scents, and colors that engage both touch and sight.

Collage captures and reassembles visual textures. By incorporating images of flora, leaves, and landscapes into the collage, it mimics the layered, tactile quality of a floral arrangement, transforming it into a two-dimensional exploration of natural texture.

Inspired by memories of long walks through the fields and woods of Provence, where beautiful gardens brimmed with colorful birds, insects, and more, I began creating collages that I envisioned as my mother’s imaginary gardens.

When the pandemic struck and we all began wearing masks, I created collages based on old-world portraits, leaving only the eyes visible and surrounded by flora and fauna cut from historical art and nature books. That original series now seems prescient in light of our months of masking and the COVID pandemic. Masked, the eyes were truly our only “window to the soul.”

Then my work became more conceptual and started to reflect themes of loss, memory, healing, joy, and a range of other emotions, all blended within surreal imagery.

Dominique Pfahl