Fleur Olby is a photographic artist, her delicately sensual photographic work is about the environment, the transformative spirit of nature & the experience or sensation of ‘beauty’. Her practice developed through an aesthetic focus on still-life photography & the colour white, a professional grounding that along with many years’ experience of studio work for editorial, design & advertising clients, led her back to the subject of natural light & Goethe’s Colour theory on the refraction of light from black. The series, Colour from Black is an exploration of the line of abstraction of Nature, Air, Light – where a photographic image connects to an abstract emotion – Memory of, & movement through nature – the different scales of plants, gardens & landscape alongside a paradoxical engagement with the static image, create a convergence in her work which captures both motion & stillness: lightness & dark.
Established in London, her work has featured extensively in leading international & UK publications including online photography magazine, LensCulture & Fotofilmic. The magazines of The Independent; The Sunday Times; Financial Times & Observer, & awarded a Silver D&AD for work commissioned for the Eden Project.
Fleur, Plant Portraits her first monograph was published in 2005 by Fuel Publishing.
In 2018 she self-published her series, Velvet Black, launched at Impressions Photobook Fair, Bradford – Included in the V&A collection of Artists’ books in The National Library, Aperture’s Photobook library, Biblioscapes digital library, The Martin Parr Foundation Library and The Garden Museum Collection.
The A6 special edition was also displayed in the vitrine at The Photographers’ Gallery bookshop, London.
Exhibitions include her recent solo show Velvet Black-Notes at The Garden Museum, London; Galerie Prints, Photo London, Field Editions, Chicago Art Fair, On Making, at The Photography Gallery in Gdansk’s National Museum, Poland & The Romantic Landscape, Norderlicht House of Photography.
Fleur Olby lives and works in North Yorkshire, UK.
– Text by Johanna Melvin and Fleur Olby.