(gentle acoustic music) - Art is an integral part of who we are.

I think that everyone is an artist at some point, in some way in their life.

It expresses a part of ourselves that, when it is expressed, we have a much more full life.

(gentle acoustic music) When I was young, my mother gave me a flower press for a present and I started pressing flowers and I had one of those rock tumblers and I made agates.

So I've always needed to have my hands busy creating something.

I started off in college with a business degree, and that was just a little too boring for me, and so I took an interest test and it said that I should be a florist.

And so I'm like, "Oh, that really sounds perfect," so I went to school to learn the mechanics of floral design, and then I worked in the field and specialized in wedding flowers.

I was playing online, looking for something creative to do, I saw this botanical plaster art, and I'm like, "I've gotta figure out how that's done."

And it took a couple years for me to figure out the best plaster, the best moisture of content for the clay, and then I've just been having a lot of fun.

I lost a child 13 years ago, and if I wasn't working, I was pretty shut down.

And this is the first thing that kept me from shutting down after work.

It was revolutionarily healing for me, and I would consider it the biggest blessing in my life.

Bas-relief is anything that's raised from the surface.

So botanical, if you add that to it, it means that I used flowers, leaves, branches, anything that is fresh that will leave an impression in the clay.

(gentle acoustic music) I will pick my florals, and then I roll a slab of clay out to get a uniform thickness in the clay.

(gentle acoustic music) And then I will place and arrange the flowers on the clay and press them in.

I use just a standard clay, and the really cool thing is it's ecological in that I can reuse the clay time and time again.

I pull them out, and then I build a border, and then I pour in the stone plaster on top of that.

It's a really strong, dense plaster that captures all of the intricate details of the flowers beautifully.

And then once that cures, I'm able to pull back the clay and it reveals your piece.

And that's absolutely the most exciting part, is to peel back the clay just to see how it turns out.

'Cause you don't really know, you don't know how something's gonna turn out until you peel the clay back and it's always in the reverse, so it doesn't look like you think it's gonna look when you peel back the clay either.

Once you peel back the clay, you cannot rearrange the flowers.

And as a flower arranger, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, why didn't I put that there?"

Or, "Why didn't I add something there?"

So I would say, there's a lot that goes to the landfill.

(laughs) From there, it gets sanded and edited, and then I'll paint and then I put a hanger on it and hang it on the wall.

(gentle acoustic music) I get inspired pretty much last minute.

On a walk, I will take a leaf and I'll flip it over just to see the veining in the leaf to say, "Oh my goodness, this would be amazing, "this would capture great."

Or, last year, I had these tall wheat flowers and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, they're just perfect right now, "if I could capture 'em right now."

I also will do memorial pieces for people.

I'll take the flowers from the arrangements of the celebration of life, or wedding flowers, and then I'll bring them home and then I'll arrange them on the clay and create a piece that way.

I don't have any favorite flowers that I use, and I'm always experimenting to see how they'll work.

I will get in a bunch of flowers and they don't press well, or they stick in the clay, and to get them out of the clay, it marks up the clay too much.

I'll find ones, like delphinium are beautiful, they have a wonderful relief.

Pine branches are pretty amazing.

You get such detail you wouldn't know that it's not the real pine branch that you're looking at.

Sage leaves, they have intricate veining in them, it's beautiful.

When people look at my art, I would love them to appreciate the beauty of nature and the flowers and the fine parts and pieces that it contains.

I believe that my early exposure to flowers and flower pressing gave me a delight when I look at a flower.

Just their beauty overwhelms me.

When I work on art, it's as though time will stop.

I'm in this wonderful world of exploration and joy.

I love it, yeah, I absolutely love it.

(gentle acoustic music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.