About
Olga Prinku is a botanical and embroidery artist living in North Yorkshire, UK. Her art practice focuses on material investigation and innovation in the context of textiles. It explores the boundaries of what can be achieved using real organic material as her metaphorical thread to create bio-tapestry.
She uses various techniques to attach natural materials – such as dried and preserved flowers, foliage, grasses, twigs, seedheads and berries – to tulle fabric.
Olga created the concept of flowers-on-tulle embroidery in 2016, and the techniques she uses are entirely self-taught.
Olga sees her artistic work as a paying homage to the beauty and wonder of nature by combining natural elements in new ways – and as a reflection on the fragility yet strength of the natural world around us and our relationship with it.
In this exhibition Olga is presenting works from two distinct series graft and about time. Started in 2022 Graft series is an ongoing experiment working with foraged twigs creating work inspired by trees and the beautiful branch structures they construct in nature, exploring the rhythm and the order that exists in the natural world.
A series started in 2019 About time explores the notion of time. These clocks are created with foraged dried dandelion seed heads – a nod to the childhood game of telling the time by blowing the seeds off a “dandelion clock” but intended also to invite reflection on the transience of life, and the balance in nature between resilience and fragility. The dandelions are among the hardiest plants, capable of growing seemingly anywhere, while their seed heads are among the most delicate and challenging of organic materials to work with.
Olga’s work has been exhibited from Venice to California. In 2024 she had her first solo exhibition, at the National Trust property Hidcote, and was a finalist in the QEST Sanderson Rising Star Awards in 2024.
Her first book, Dried Flower Embroidery: An Introduction to the Art of Flowers on Tulle, is published by Quadrille.
