“It’s a situation that many have experienced; trying to marry up the person that you have become with the perception of the person that you were before you left…”

Does Florence Broadhurst need an introduction? Singer, dancer, painter, successful entrepreneur, designer, traveler, cultural appropriator, Svengali, formidable BS artist: more of a force of nature than an individual. Broadhurst was a woman who was able to both understand and steer the zeitgeist; an individual of her time and an individual before her time.

Drawing upon an awkward part of Florence’s life, After the Gap Year explores the period she worked in her father’s Queensland pub after arriving back from Shanghai and before starting her world-famous textile and wallpaper business. Referencing Florence’s subsequent Asian ‘inspired’ wallpaper designs, Claire & Sean have painted tributes upon beer and wine cardboard packaging. This combination of the exotic and the mundane brings together her experiences of different aesthetic cultures with the realities of working back in a rural pub in Australia.