Florist fills the cracks of urban life. The London-based artist’s hand-cut, pixel-patterned mosaic installations transform blight into beauty, bringing color and purpose to forlorn spaces across Europe, India and Africa.
Now Florist (@florist.ldn) is setting his sights on America. On July 1, Vertical Gallery will release “Stars, Stripes and Stems,” his first screenprint for the U.S. market, produced in celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary. Learn all about Florist’s blossoming career in the latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series.
Vertical Gallery: Tell us about “Stars, Stripes and Stems.”
Florist: It's a symbol of affection for your country — for your culture and your way of life.
There's an artist here in England called Fat Cap Sprays, and we went out for a walk the other day. He said to me “It was really refreshing to hear you say on one of your Instagram videos that you love America. That’s a very controversial thing to say.” Which I think is absolutely bonkers. There are parts of any presidency that people aren’t going to like, but I'm not here for that. I'm here for the America that I loved seeing on TV when I was growing up — the films, the cartoons, the stories, the history.
I’m sure somebody's gonna pick apart all these things. That's the time we live in, where everybody's arguing over everything. But I just really love America, and I'm not afraid to say that.
You’ve installed mosaics everywhere from Manchester to Mumbai. Where and how did you learn your craft?
I lived a lot of my life going off the beaten track, and not being as productive as I wish I was. I was drinking and taking drugs and stuff like that. When I got sober, I decided I needed to do something with my life. I had a folder with mosaic photos I’d saved from Instagram, and I was like “I want to do that.” I wanted to create something that would last, you know?
I started out by watching videos on YouTube. I scoured [French street artist] Invader’s videos, trying to learn how to make it efficient and quick. But the process is very confusing to get across in a video, so I became quite stuck. I then paid for a very short course at the London School of Mosaic, which has since closed down. They liked what I created, and said that I should apply for a scholarship. I got the scholarship, but I only stayed there for one term. To be honest, it was too slow, and I already knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to fill these bits of plaster that have fallen off of buildings or whatnot.
At first I wanted to fill them with quotes, or proverbs, or famous lines from films or songs. But it was too complicated. The biggest mosaic I did read “In the blue of this life,” which is a line from the Beach House song “Lazuli.” It meant the world to me. But when I showed it to a friend of mine called Joe, he said “What the fuck does it mean?” He didn’t know the song. I realized anybody walking by is gonna objectively look at it and be like “It’s meaningless.” I needed to focus on images, so that people can draw from them what they want.
What is your process? What kinds of materials and tools do you use?
Originally, I would make old-style mosaics laid by hand, the way the Romans and the Mesopotamians made them. The name for that is Andamento [an Italian term for the visual flow, movement and directional lines created by a mosaic’s tiles, known as tesserae]. Putting them up in the street is a real challenge, though. The version I do now is called “pixelated,” and it’s a lot quicker. You just slap the tiles down. You can do a square meter in about three days, whereas a square meter in old-style mosaic will take you a week.
If you’ve ever seen mosaics laid out in grid fashion inside a swimming pool or a sauna or a steam room, there are grout lines in white or black or grey. I don't like grout lines, so I had some trays 3D-printed to remove them. The tiles sit next to each other, held in place using industrial-strength glue. The rest is just my eye — knowing which colors look good, where to put the piece on the street, visibility, and stuff like that.
It takes so long to make a mosaic. A lot of thought goes into it, and it's expensive, so it's kind of soul-crushing when the stars don't align and one gets removed. But with some of my mosaics, the stars have aligned, and they're still there. They're the best ones. Someone recently shared with me an image of a piece I did last year in Barcelona. I love the art, but I'm more interested in the fact that it's still there. It means I did a good job.
Where did this passion for mosaics originate in the first place?
I love repeating patterns. I’ve looked into why using a bit of ChatGPT — Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology and stuff — and it's probably to do with the safety of predictability. The cityscape is chaos. It's lights, it's police sirens, it's this and it's that. A repeated pattern that fills a space gives people a sense of calm very deep down.
I’m most interested in mosaics and alfresco wall paintings from the antiquity period — art that’s stood the test of time. When I was young, I went to a Roman villa, where I saw a mosaic of Medusa. I vividly remember my teacher saying to me “Don't stare at it, or you'll turn to stone.”
Why did you adopt the Florist alias?
I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between humans and flowers, and how that must have come about. Flowers are just the most beautiful things in the world. They’re arranged for weddings, anniversaries, deaths — the most profound moments in our lives. I remember reading in a book by [self-help author] Eckhart Tolle that flowers could have been the first form of currency.
There was also a game I played when I was younger, called Final Fantasy VII. I loved this game so much. A character in it is called Arieth, and she was a florist — a flower seller. Arieth gets killed in the game, and my friend Dean and I have always said that moment was kind of our first introduction to grief. It was just so sad.
What’s next for you?
I’m in ‘Ascending’ [Vertical Gallery’s September 2026 group exhibition]. I've spent the last few days thinking about what to submit. This will be my first U.S. gallery exhibition. I'm excited for that.
I've also been toying with what to put in Brick Lane, a spot near where I live in London. During the daytime, there’s a lot of commerce there — people buying stuff. At nighttime, there's a lot of addicts running around, and a lot of drunk people. It's the last place you would go for tranquility. I want to do a waterfall: rocks and flowers and a blue sky. Something that would really stand out. It's all about creating little moments of serenity.
PURCHASE "STARS, STRIPES AND STEMS" HERE
