Cynthia Fan and I had plans to bust into the Barbican Conservatory on a spring afternoon, but while we’d got permission from the gardener, the place was undergoing a deep clean. Instead, the South African artist and scientist leads me around the Beech Gardens and the lake, instead. She’s lived in London for the past couple of years, and chose the Brutalist masterpiece as a meeting point: “I just feel like every time I come there’s different things to look at.” One consistent favourite, though, is the incongruous turquoise sculpture of two dancing dolphins that sits along from the Nigel Dunnett-designed Beech Gardens. “I love the dolphin sculpture,” she laughs. “Everything here is so perfect and streamlined, and it’s so kitsch in comparison, it looks like someone forgot about it.”
The incongruous and the unplanned are two things that stand out about Cynthia’s work. We last met while she was in the final throes of her PhD in plant molecular biology at Edinburgh University. Most students in the Plant Science Institute are confined to “the centre of a square building with no windows,” but Cynthia’s supervisor gave her an office in the city’s Botanic Gardens. “It would be rare if there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t leave the office to go into the garden or the glasshouses. I would always find another thing that was flowering, or that was doing something interesting, like a new leaf growing out with weird colours.”
A former florist, Cynthia’s daily forays into the gardens meant she befriended the horticultural team, who would tip her off to particularly floriferous specimens that she could arrange with. The results - bold, playful combinations of, for instance, palest pink carnations with a spike of fir needles and a forked twig, or, to quote her Instagram caption, “Narcissus, Begonia maculata wightii and black kale from Aldi” - suggested a bold new voice in floristry. During the grim indoor days of the pandemic, Fan’s creations evoked an outdoors that felt otherworldly.
She’s since completed her PhD and curated shows for a nature-inspired gallery in London, but is currently leaning into the valuable space between things: art or science, research or creativity. So much of Cynthia’s work occupies both. “I really struggle to call myself an artist,” she tells me, “and I don’t really identify as being a scientist, either. For me, it’s plant-related things, in any shape or form. I think that’s maybe the core that I’ve gotten down to. But as an occupation, I still don’t have the word.”
Her creations are similarly difficult to define. She sees arrangements as something confined by a container, and sculpture as something free-standing and self-existing. Recently Fan has been making gravity-defying constructions from dry Cordyline leaves and bamboo, or wrapping overgrown grass, foraged from the side of the Old Kent Road, in red thread. Last autumn, she exhibited at Olympia with a limestone block and a quarter of a trunk from a redwood, selected from hundreds in a “junk yard that tree surgeons go to” in Portland. Can it be an arrangement without a vase or flowers, does something exist as a sculpture if it can be given back to the land?
Perhaps the meaning is in the absence of definition. Cynthia gleefully announces that, in terms of research, her PhD “findings were kind of a disaster - there were too many different things going on for anyone to pinpoint in four years. But I like that,” she explains. The variations in begonia leaf shapes that she was studying “don’t abide by my PhD hypothesis, they’re just going to do their own thing.”
It was the surprise of plants that first drew her to them, particularly the desiccation-tolerant ones that ignited her further study. “She showed us a time lapse of these plants going from brown and dead-looking to green and flowering in a couple of hours. You think of plants as being so sensible and stationary and not moving. I loved the unpredictable nature of them, I found it so interesting.”
That element of surprise, or of openness to being surprised, is now crucial in her work. An accidental slide into floristry while waitressing at a restaurant in Cape Town was formalised when she started taking Ikebana classes, a term Cynthia had encountered while researching floral inspiration. “My Ikebana teacher once said to me that she wouldn’t go looking for material before each class, she would just put it out into the universe that she had a class, and then she would see something.
“And I do like the idea of having a serendipitous relationship with plants. It’s become an approach that I take when I make things, I wait for the materials to come to me. Often it’s something that you can’t buy. And sometimes you can't even go looking for it. It just has to find you.”
Cynthia wears our Garment Dyed Linen Oversized Shirt and Garment Dyed Linen Wide Leg Trousers.
Words by Alice Vincent.
Photography by Billy Barraclough.
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