MA Residential Week - Breaking The Ice

Flowers and Flesh: A Week at Lake Floda

I'm still a bit stunned by the week I've just had in Sweden, and coming back to the real world with a bump!

Last week, I flew to Lake Floda for the residential week that kicks off my MA in Creative Practice. I was excited, definitely, but also properly nervous. Thirty-five people I knew nothing about, gathering in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. I was completely out of my comfort zone!

The location was stunning though. We were right on the lake, and when we arrived the ice was so thick you could walk on it. Terrifying at first - I wasn't sure I trusted it - but as the week went on I got braver! Thursday night it snowed, proper Swedish snow that just kept coming. Not blizzardy exactly, just persistent and beautiful. Freezing cold, the kind where you can see every breath, but those crisp days with the sun low in the sky were glorious. The sunrises made getting up early actually worth it.

Early morning sessions - but first tea!

What struck me most was the breadth of what people are doing. Painters across different mediums, people writing and publishing books, poets planning tours. One collaboration that made me smile - someone's got a water tower in their hometown in Poland, and they're going to work with a wig maker to create an exhibition where the wig sits on top of this tower. I mean, pretty imaginative!

Everyone had their endeavour - the thing they're exploring for the year. And I turned up not entirely sure what mine was.

I knew it was going to involve two of my two loves: flowers and life drawing. It was a conversation with a recent graduate that made it click. She was lovely, asked exactly the right questions, and the conversation just flowed. And suddenly there it was.

‘Flowers and Flesh’ My endeavour is centred around the thought that there is no 'ugly' stage of life, just a series of beautiful transitions.

I'm going to create twelve paintings that examine how flowers and the human body mirror each other - emergence to bud, blossom, fading, death, decay. Working with different mediums and surfaces, materials that themselves change over time. I am planning to show the work at a gallery/exhibition space in Brighton eventually, and it's meant to be a celebration of all stages of life, not just youth. With flowers, there's no single moment of perfection, just constant change. And that's what I want to explore with the human form. Not this idea that we peak at twenty-five and then it's all downhill. We change. We transform - and there's beauty in every stage.

The MA is self-led, which means I need to get properly organised! Weekly check-ins but no clients creating structure, no wedding season rhythm. Just the work and my commitment to it. So at the end of the week I’m feeling energised and clearer about what I'm doing. The connections made this week feel significant - proper creative conversations with people whose work and stories have already shifted my thinking.

Over the year I'll share how the paintings develop, what it's like doing self-led creative practice, how fifteen years of floristry knowledge feeds into this work.

If you'd like to follow along, I'd love that. It feels both terrifying and totally the right thing, which I suspect is where the best work happens!