Fleur Olby, BA (Hons), MA (CSM) is an artist photographer working at the intersection of Gardens, Landscape and Plant Portraits. She questions and explores the essence or sensation of the Enigmatic spirit of Nature. Her narrative is in the form of visual poems.
Her practice developed through an aesthetic focus on still-life photography & the colour from 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 differential scales of plant, garden & 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 (1993), her work has featured extensively in leading international & UK publications including online photography magazine, LensCulture & Fotofilmic – The magazines of The Sunday Times; The Observer; The Financial Times and The Independent. She was 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 published her series, Velvet Black, on her Imprint and launched it at Impressions Photobook Fair, Bradford – It is also Included in the V&A collection of Artists’ books in The National Library, Aperture’s Photobook 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.
The first edition from the series Peripheral View was published on her Imprint as an Artist Newspaper under the title – Hue,(2023).
Exhibitions include her solo show Velvet Black-Notes at The Garden Museum, London; Lilac Blue – ink Blue Black with Galerie Prints, Photo London, Poa Trivialis with Field Editions, Chicago Art Fair, Velvet Black exhibited with Trace Editions in On Making, at The Photography Gallery in Gdansk’s National Museum, Poland & Fog exhibited in The Romantic Landscape, Norderlicht House of Photography.
Fleur Olby lives and works in North Yorkshire, UK.
– Text by Johanna Melvin and Fleur Olby.