Siobhan Wilson on her Fringe show FLOWERCORE

There’s a scene in Alice In Wonderland where Alice starts daydreaming of a world where ‘All the flowers / Would have very extra-special powers / They would sit and talk to me for hours / When I'm lonely in a world of my own’, or so the song goes. Talking to musician, composer and artist Siobhan Wilson about FLOWERCORE, her forthcoming immersive piece of intimate gig theatre appearing at this year’s Fringe as part of Made In Scotland Showcase, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the solitary yet curious Alice.

Wilson’s Alice In Wonderland moment came during lockdown, those aforementioned lyrics close to a blow-by-blow account of her experiences as she found herself inspired by the majesty of the Scottish wildflowers surrounding her lockdown home in Coldstream. “I moved to the countryside to live in a little flat more or less in the middle of nowhere, very removed from friends and family, or the music scene, for a long time. I built a music studio in my little flat and I also got a dog,” Wilson explains over a Zoom call from Blackpool in the middle of a July heatwave. “Whenever I wasn't working, I would go outside with the dog. I kept a flower diary every day as a way to process all of those feelings that everyone was going through during lockdown. But also, I was confronted with a lot of isolation from rural living and essentially kind of poverty, I guess, for a few years of not having any money – I lost all my work. So the wildflowers provided this kind of stability and consistency for me in something that I could document, but also process my feelings through.”

As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before Wilson turned these wildflower sketches into a series of records – FLOWERCORE volumes one through three – soundtracking each of the unique flowers she spent so much time with during an extended period of solitude. “Wildflowers have such beautiful shapes, and when you look at the shapes in nature, they're really inspiring for melodic shapes,” she tells us. “Kind of like the Art Nouveau painters, when they were inspired by flowers to create geometric, flowing lines, the elegance and the shapes within the flowers can translate onto a score and onto a musical page.”

You can hear these shapes in the cascading Snowdrop's Tune, the round staccato of Clovers White, in the whimsy wiggle of Daffodils and the dreamlike rising and falling harp lines of Heather. This process of creating music from shapes and drawings is reminiscent of how composer Anna Meredith works, I mention. "I think [my music] is a little bit more whimsical, spending time with the flowers and then trying to really belong to their world,” Wilson says, laughing, “I know that sounds pretentious, but I sat in silence for weeks at a time without speaking to anyone, which sounds really unhealthy (I had the dog, so I wasn't completely alone), just soaking in their environments. They're so small, so there's a lot of comfort in sort of surrounding myself with all these tiny little friends.”

Photo by Edge Photography.

This month, “I'm trying to bring people into a little corner of the Scottish countryside in the city centre,” Wilson says of her immersive live show that's sure to offer a similar level of comfort, respite and escapism for those who attend during the middle of one of the world’s biggest and busiest arts festivals. To make it fully immersive, FLOWERCORE will include visual projections, with Wilson narrating sections of her flower diary, interspersed by live flower songs. “We’re stepping through my flower diary,” she says. For her six-day run at The Gilded Saloon, Wilson will play a mix of cello and guitar, singing gorgeously rich layered harmonies with Niamh Corkey for the first half of the run, and Charm of Finches for the second.

So you see, Siobhan Wilson is indeed our very own Alice, except with a dog instead of a cat, and an immense talent for music – naturally, of course! The more we talk about her project, and flowers in general, the more she forgets about the extreme heatwave she’s dealing with and the more animated she becomes. Towards the end of our chat we’re talking about biosonification and the superior intelligence of slime mold. “There’s so much that we don’t know about plants,” Wilson excitedly says, sat upright like a flower stretching for the sun.

“I hope I've given the flowers a little bit of a voice,” she concludes, “but for me, I feel more grateful to the flowers because they gave me so much more than I ever gave them, you know? They provided a mirror to me, not just a window, to have a kind of artist reflection.” And despite moving back to the city last year, she tells us, “I’m still writing flower songs – it’s a lifelong thing for me, I’m totally obsessed.”

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FLOWERCORE by Siobhan Wilson, The Gilded Saloon (Basement), 17-22 Aug, 3pm

siobhanwilson.com