Dr Lisa Cooper is a florist, artist, author and Doctor of Philosophy.
She holds a Doctorate Of Philosophy in Fine Art from The College Of Fine Arts, University Of New South Wales and is a permanent artist resident of The Mint in Sydney, Australia. Doctor Cooper Studio is her commercial flower business spanning major installations to hand delivered flower gestures.
Dr Cooper’s work has been featured in many Australian and international books, magazines, journals and television programs. while her distinctive flower work has been commissioned by some of the most celebrated in the business and arts world.
Our founder Elise and Lisa have collaborated on scents over the years, including our best seller bougie parfumee Sainte T inspired by the life and grace of Sainte Therese, French Carmelite nun canonised in 1925.
Enjoy our interview with the revered Dr Lisa Cooper
What flower represents you during this time in life and why?
I think I am nearest the rose with or without the stipulation of time. I have always described my mother as being a rose… and so it follows. I am resilient and not entirely without grace. I am robust and poetical, profuse, textured, fragrant and veined and, now and then, marked, stippled and bare. I ‘cut’ for a living and without thought to morality or consequence will cut to protect the ‘flesh’ of those that I keep in my heart.
Who is a philosopher that you admire, and if you were to choose a flower to represent their work what would it be?
Simone Weil.
The cauliflower is a flower that mankind has come to classify as a vegetable (the only other being the broccoli) whereby we eat the florescence, the florescence! That mankind has taken this flower into his heart (and stomach) and transfigured it a vegetable constitutes a leap of the great conceptual chasm between that which feeds our soul and that which feeds our physical self. The cauliflower is a concise metaphor for the fundamental equivalence of our necessity for both physical and soulful sustenance – the crux of Weil’s oeuvre.
How would you visually describe your work to someone who is yet to see it?
I wouldn’t.
What I would have to say about my work is less important than my work – I would encourage them to look at it.
But let me try…
Perhaps it is poetic, carnal, brutal, defiant, harmonic, discordant, painterly, heroic, punctuant, vivid and whimsical, by turns and to degrees.
Join us on our journey
