In her first commissioned exhibition in the United States, renowned English artist Jessica Palmer, reveals a stunning collection of paper artworks at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum. The installation in the museum of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, runs for nearly a year (to March 2027), and celebrates two of Jessica’s biggest passions: books and botanicals.

From her studio in Bath, Palmer explains, “Each piece expresses my work with paper as a dynamic medium in sculpture, paper cutting, and collage. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to create something in the UK that I could box up and ship to fill a gallery which is 44 feet long and 4,000 miles away in the US. This is the result.”

Palmer’s Missouri Wildflower Florilegium—a collection of 100 individual botanical collages —will be displayed alongside her monumental 13-foot-long Glory of the Garden papercut, featuring 100,000 cuts from a single sheet of paper. 

The exhibit invites visitors to explore the connection between nature and literature through Palmer’s delicate and imaginative paper art. The show also features an extraordinary Missouri Garden Soundscape made for Jessica’s installation by the Garden’s team. Her Literary Garden Timeline is complemented by 7 Paper Queens, each representing a different era in garden history and the evolving role of botany as inspiration in art and writing.