It’s the last few days to visit the farOpen Spring Art Exhibition at Canwood Gallery & Sculpture Park, Open Thurs 23rd - Sun 26th May, 11am - 4pm
But have you spotted the Flower Cloud hanging from the beams of the Turbine Hall?

With so many farOpen artists being inspired by nature and our surrounding landscape, it seemed fitting to invite Jo Thompson from Wye Valley Flowers to create a key focal point to bring a little bit of the outdoors, in. As the exhibition runs for the whole month, fresh Spring flowers were out of the question but Jo came up with a stunning, sustainable design using dry flowers to elevate the space. And we just love it! 
Jo says "We were delighted to be asked supply an ariel design for the farOpen exhibition at Canwood Gallery. We are an artisan flower farm and eco floral design studio, so the mechanics holding the Flower Cloud were constructed to be as sustainable as possible and reusable. We obviously don’t use any floral foam, as this is a micro-plastic and contains formaldehyde. Similarly we avoid alternative products as they tend to be biodegradable, rather than compostable and have not yet been proven to break down to something that is beneficial to the Earth. We used recycled chicken wire from pheasant fencing, filled with dry moss to hold the stems. The moss has been ethically harvested under licence, in an area due for coppicing.
We try to design out waste for our installations so we chose dried flowers, rather than live flowers. This was partly due to the weight and longevity of the exhibition. We wanted to capture the transition at this time of year, when it still feels wet and grey into late spring. We incorporated a background of dried eucalyptus which comes from an enormous tree on our farm planted in the 80s. As well as huge firework allium seed heads. We took several colour options with us, as we wanted to compliment the beautiful artwork being hung that day.
On the day we chose a palette of buttery yellow, through to fiery oranges and deep burgundy. All colours found on our flower farm at this time of year. May sees a move from the early spring flowers of blue muscari and hyacinth, bright pink tulips and yellow narcissi to a more sophisticated colourway of apricot to coral ranunculus, chartreuse greenery, indigo cornflowers and pale pink to deep purple peonies. Most of the dried materials were in fact gathered in August and September, carefully drying and storing them over Winter - but it was the colours of spring we wanted to represent. Creating a snapshot of the local hedgerows and Meadows. We used thlaspi, maize, dried grasses, ammi, poppies, golden twisted hazel, achillea and strawflowers.
The dried flowers ensured the piece was airy, turning gently with any movement or airflow in the Turbine Hall - as well as being safe for visitors. The piece can also be deconstructed and the materials reused - after some delicate dusting with a hairdryer! In fact the Flower Cloud will be coming back to our design studio to hang in the flower barn, for visitors to the farOpen Art Trail to enjoy July 6-14th."
Visit the exhibition and see the floral display in situ alongside a diverse range of art from 46 artists from the Forest of Dean & Wye/Severn Rivers (farOpen) art collective with over 120 pictures, 21 indoor sculptures, 9 outdoor sculptures and 3 collections of jewellery, 4 collections of ceramics and a gift shop of smaller artworks, cards and gifts.  Please come and enjoy the galleries, cafe and sculpture park at your leisure.  Free entry. Free parking. HR1 4NF
farOpen would like to extend a very big thankyou to Jo and her student assistant for the installation. Please come and see it in situ and visit her website https://www.faropen.co.uk/wye-valley-flowers.html for all her contact details should you need a floral arrangement or something similar. She's a lovely lady and we can't recommend her highly enough.