There is a moment, standing inside CJ Hendry’s Flower Shop, when you stop questioning whether the blooms are real. They are not. They are fabric — painstakingly cut, shaped and arranged into something that looks impossibly alive. That is the point. That has always been the point with Hendry: the line between the real and the rendered, blurred until it disappears.
After sold-out runs in New York, Melbourne and Sydney, Brisbane has its turn. The Flower Shop is open now at 1 Arthur Street, Fortitude Valley, until 12 July — and for anyone who grew up watching this city produce something genuinely world-class, there is something quietly significant about Hendry returning home.
What the Flower Shop Actually Is
The format is deceptively simple. Stems are $10 each. Every tenth stem is free. You walk in, choose from hundreds of handcrafted fabric flowers — roses, poppies, tulips, peonies, ranunculus — and build your bouquet. Some are exclusively Australian designs, available only at this location.
What you take home is not a vase of flowers that will be dead by Thursday. It is a piece of considered craft — something between art object and home accessory — that will sit in your space for years. The Flower Shop is one of those rare experiences that is genuinely hard to describe until you’re in it.
Get there early. The queues in other cities have been long, and the exclusively Australian designs won’t last.
The Artist: CJ Hendry
Catherine Jenna Hendry was born in South Africa in 1988 and raised in Brisbane. She studied architecture at QUT and finance at UQ, eventually dropping out of both to make art — a decision that, in retrospect, seems obvious. By 2013 she had committed fully to her practice. By 2015 she had moved to New York. By 2020 she had become one of the most recognised contemporary artists in the world.
Her signature technique is a form of hyper-realism executed almost entirely in coloured pencil — a deliberate, almost perverse choice, given how labour-intensive it is at the scale she works. She draws luxury objects: Supreme sneakers, Hermès leather goods, Birkin bags, Aston Martins. The drawings are enormous — often the size of a wall — and so precise that photographs of them are routinely mistaken for photographs of the objects themselves.
What makes Hendry’s work compelling beyond the technical spectacle is the tension it creates. She renders the language of luxury and consumerism with extraordinary fidelity, but presents it in a medium — pencil on paper — that is among the most low-tech and labour-intensive in the artist’s toolkit. There is something almost subversive in it. The result is work that attracts both the art world and the streetwear crowd, and somehow manages not to alienate either.
She found her audience on Instagram before the art world came to her — early proof that the rules of access and exposure in contemporary art were already changing. Her work now sells through major auction houses and is held in private collections globally. She has installed large-scale immersive exhibitions in New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and London. The Flower Shop is a different register — more intimate, more accessible — but the craft and the considered eye are exactly the same.
Worth Your Time
The Flower Shop is open until 12 July at 1 Arthur Street, Fortitude Valley. It’s a short walk from Newstead — and one of the more genuinely interesting things happening in the precinct right now. Free to browse. $10 per stem. Exclusively Australian designs available only at this location.
Go before it closes.
