Covington-born artist Emma Fick imbues her works with botanical elements native to Louisiana’s landscape, offering a fresh take on the time-honored motif via her lush, Medieval-meets-Renaissance aesthetic. For “Verdant Embrace,” a 2024 solo show at Parlour Gallery on Camp Street, Fick filled the space with floral-embellished clay vessels playfully stocked with plastic flowers and rich watercolor paintings of pots filled with painted flowers layered over wallpaper opulently illustrated with native plants. (View the works at emmafick.com.) Drawing on multiple inspirations, the effect is an opulent maximalism that can be replicated at home using the new collection of five Louisiana native-plant-inspired wallpapers Fick created exclusively for Magazine Street wallpaper and fabric showroom Spruce (sprucenola.com). Fick describes the debut pattern, “Verdant Embrace,” as “a tangle of Louisiana-native plants that soar up walls, a visual celebration of our native flora in which plants multiply and intertwine,” and encourages local plant enthusiasts to play I-Spy to identify the pattern’s myriad vegetation. (Hint: Featured prominently are magnolia, American beautyberry, iris and Spanish moss, but there are many more to discover.) Fick says she not only leaned on local plant life and middle-European works commissioned by royalty, but also studied the Arts and Crafts Movement and its celebration of decorative arts and, in particular, English textile designer William Morris’ patterns. “I’m most excited about this wallpaper being out in the world so I can see what people layer atop it,” says Fick. “I can’t wait to see how the art, light fixtures and furniture work in conversation with the paper, and how the paper informs other choices. Interior design is such an exercise in world-building.”
