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Last month I caught up with Julia Kirk, founder and teacher at Wild Gorse Studio in the beautiful Belladrum Estate. A conversation that came about quite by chance when a press release appeared in my inbox. Intrigued, I reached out and spoke with Julia, covering everything from her career as a florist, her superpower at consistently baking excellent cheese scones and her life in the Highlands of Scotland.
Julia’s background
I starting by asking Julia about her path into floristry. She recounted that she’d left school when she was 16 years old and although she had achieved good grades, there wasn’t the support available for her to pursue what she wanted to do. As a result she ended up doing a traditional four-year apprenticeship in floristry, which turned out to be something that she enjoyed and had a natural flare for.
Over the course of 10 years, she built up her skill-set in floristry but also dabbled with other creative industries. She told me, ‘I really enjoyed writing, I worked as a fashioner buyer and I trained as a milliner because I figured it was sculptural which is similar to the compositional skills you have in floristry.’ Here, she thoughtfully said, ‘I think you find in a lot of peoples creative journeys, there’s a rupture that happens.’ For Julia, that ‘rupture’ happened in 2013, when she applied to art school and received an unconditional offer. It’s something she’d wanted to do when she left school but it wasn’t considered a viable option for her. She told me, ‘I find it fascinating, that the choices that we had even in the nineties are not the opportunities that we have now in the creative industries.’ Despite being offered a place, it ended up not being a realistic proposition for her to take at that time in her life, being a single parent of three young children.
She spoke openly about wrestling with that decision and the idea of what makes somebody an artist. She told me, ‘I knew I was an artist but at that time I felt like I needed a degree to prove that.’ Artistry, is something she talks about a lot on her course, how it is not just a practice but a mindset and a way of being and living.
Through grappling with this decision, she realised that she still had a real love and passion for flowers but had simply become disenchanted with the ‘conveyer-belt, mass production, inter-flora’ work she was doing for other people at that time. This realisation, allowed her to accept that she didn’t need an art degree to pursue her creative path. She spoke about Jay Archer, a hugely respected florist she looked up to and how, in viewing her work, Julia gave herself permission to say ‘I don’t need an art degree to do this, I have all of this experience, I know the subject inside and out’ and from this dark time in her life, Wild Gorse Studio was born.
About Highland Flower School
The school later followed and is where Julia teaches a mix of workshops, community classes and a six-month floristry course – a hands on introduction to professional floristry that focuses on the contemporary application of traditional floristry and allows students to develop their own style. We touched on the impact of the pandemic, which forced Julia to close the school before they had a solid, consecutive twelve-month window in the studio and also to adapt – encouraging them to embrace and connect with their online audience. Julia told me about the online gatherings she would run – a gamble but one that bought unexpected engagement and reward. She described how people, as far as America would simultaneously create flower arrangements from their gardens or local area and how interesting it was to observe one brief being interpreted in so many different ways depending on what people could forage and their country’s season. Julia explained that off the back of the pandemic, people have had the opportunity to assess their lives and reframe their choices. She told me, ‘We’ve found that a lot of people have acted on that reevaluation and have come to us to retrain and answer that call.’
From here, we spoke about creativity and I asked Julia if she believed this was a quality innate in everyone. She maintained we are all creative but that there is a tendency as adults to tell ourselves stories that we aren’t.
She told me, ‘As part of the course we are definitely trying to unpick some of that; people come to learn but we are also trying to unlearn some of the stories we’ve told ourselves.’ She continued, ‘As children, we learn through creativity, there’s a total element of play, experimenting and exploring.’
This is something she actively encourages as part of the course, enabling students to tap into their inner child and nurture their individual talent and creativity. She said, ‘As part of the course we journal and do creative, child-like meditations, playing with play-dough for half-an-hour to ground ourselves and pull ourselves back to that time where we would just lose ourselves in things like this.’ I asked how journalling helps practically with floristry and Julia told me it’s ‘a way of trying to escape perfectionism and it’s about tapping into that natural flow of intuition and silencing the voices that say we can’t.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘it’s also about being unafraid to fail.’ She reflected, ‘Looking at nature, my favourite flowers are the ones that are entirely flawed, full of imperfections and quirks.’
The idea of the studio being a safe space is something I noted as Julia was speaking and in the beautiful videography featured on their Instagram. Julia told me, ‘I want the studio to feel welcoming, warm and safe’. She continued, ‘I think when something has been pulling on you for a long time, it’s important that people know they can come into an atmosphere where there isn’t that comparison’ which can be creatively limiting. For Julia, instilling a culture in the studio where it’s a safe space to make mistakes and where people can simply be themselves is hugely important.
About the space
I asked Julia if she could describe the studio space and how she came to be there. She explained, ‘We’re located on Belladrum estate, which came out of friendship with the owner who established Belladrum Music Festival. My studio before was in the city centre and I was really keen to relocate to the country-side for obvious reasons, to enhance the offerings, foraging and being in nature and we needed more space. I was the first person to move into the renovated Cart Shed and subsequently, I’m now surrounded by mid-century wood-workers, sculptures, lots of other artists around me which is fantastic.’
She continued, ‘I talk about my studio being a safe space but Belladrum, the air is magic, it really is, magic creative air and it’s such a joy to call that my work.’
She explained that the building ‘used to house all the carts that would be horse-drawn from a very old Scottish estate.’ She told me that on entering the Cart Shed, ‘you’re immediately met by the kitchen where we have a really large kitchen table.’ Julia described this as the place people meet, where the kettle is always on, and where cakes and baking are laid out on the table. She went on to say that it’s, ‘the central hub where we have our lunch breaks and some of our best conversations happen around that kitchen table.’ From there, the space opens up into the workshop studio where the ceilings rise to double floor height and we have a glass windows all the way down the right hand elevation. The left hand wall houses of all Wild Gorse’s props, vases, vessels and candlesticks and then there’s a utility area where there are buckets, scissors and other practical stuff needed in a working flower studio. A key focal point is the teaching table that runs down the length of the steading and at the end there’s a cosy wood burning stove. She told me how fortunate she feels to have that space, along with her dog Arthur who is very much part of studio life and ‘a very friendly wee soul’ who has an affection for pine cones and sticks.
On the impact of flowers
We finished our conversation by chatting about how flowers change and impact a space.
Julia expressed beautifully that, ‘They just add soul. It’s such a difficult one to explain, you pop flowers in a space, and it just brings a new lease of life.’ She reflected, ‘I do wonder if it’s to do with the transient nature of them and the fact that a vase is only going to be here for such a short period of time that we are going to enjoy it whilst it’s here.’
She continued, ‘It’s the colour, it’s the fact you can engage all of the senses, it’s not just the flowers, it’s the fragrance they give off, it’s the memories that fragrance might evoke - just the whole essence.’ I often think of food in this way - a trigger of memories and nostalgia - but I hadn’t ever considered that flowers could conjure similar feelings and reflections. Julia told me, ‘It’s a daffodil that does that for me. Not because of how it looks but because of how it makes me feel. It all comes down to how it smells and that first flurry of spring and of being a child in Peebles - picking daffodils and smelling them.’ She affectionately described daffodils as, ‘one of the most transporting fragrances ever’ and told me that those feelings are something they really try to consider when they're designing for clients, specifically for bridal work, and how working with fragrance is a whole other art form.
If you’d like to find out more about Julia’s work and Wild Gorse Studio you can follow them at @wildgorse and visit their website at www.wild-gorse.co.uk. If you’re interested in the Six Month Professional Floristry Course, do get in touch with Julia directly via the website. A huge thank you to Julia for taking the time to talk with me.
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