The Goddess of Ganutell

Over the past 40 years, Maria Kerr’s name has become synonymous with the Maltese art of artificial flower making, known as ganutell. DEAN MUSCAT has an audience with the goddess to discuss her lifelong pursuit to perfect her art and share this most Maltese of traditions with the world.

A petal of emerald and gold is being conjured before my very eyes.

Maria Kerr, hunched in a chair, soaks a string of thread in a thimble of water. She pulls a fine single ply free and with the unwavering hand of a surgeon, feeds it through the coiled teeth of an elliptical spiral wire frame. A noose, a flourish of scissors, and voila, the illusion is complete – a ganutell petal fully formed in what seems like seconds.

This impression of instantaneity is, of course, somewhat misleading. Just like the concert pianist or master painter, Kerr has sunk hundreds of thousands of hours into honing her art. And over the course of our interview, it’s apparent how driven she remains to perfection. She goes as far as to source the finest materials from all across the world – stardust pearls and beads from America, wiring from the UK, satin thread from Germany – to ensure her ganutell mounts possess the richest lustre, the brightest gleam.

A never-ending demand for her work means clients will have to wait close to two years for Kerr to complete their commissions. The process is painstakingly time consuming, with each flower stem taking up to three hours to finish.

So how did Kerr first become acquainted with ganutell?

Kerr admits that unlike her brothers and the men on her father’s side, she never had a raw talent for drawing. However, she found an affinity for handcrafts early on during her primary school days with the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in Balzan.

Such was the level of detail that these nuns poured into their needlework, their sewing rooms were nicknamed laboratories. It is here that a young Kerr found herself first immersed in sewing, crochet, knitting, and lace work. There was even some ganutell making at school, but her love affair with that particular craft didn’t truly begin until much later. Her first passion was sewing, a skill that has served her well all lifelong.

“I never bought anything readymade for my children and for myself,” Kerr explains of her sewing proficiency. “I even embroidered my daughter’s wedding dresses and did some bridal wear work for Alamango and Camilleri Paris Mode.”

It was after her four kids had flown the coop that Kerr found herself itching to learn something new. She initially enrolled in a gold embroidery evening class, but a last-minute flick through the course programme drew her eye to a ganutell class and she switched.

“When I saw it written down, it called to me,” she recalls. “And as soon as I worked the first basic petal, something exploded in me.”

One class in and Kerr busied herself with her first project, a winter blue-leafed bough which still hangs on her studio wall to this very day. It is an accomplished piece that, even to an untrained eye like mine, surpasses an amateur’s hesitant dry run. Clearly, Kerr had an intuitive knack for the form from the get-go. The prodigious quality of her maiden efforts even ruffled the feathers of her teacher, who at the end of the course asked Kerr in no uncertain terms to not return the following year.

Unfazed, Kerr lost herself in the labyrinthine gardens of ganutell’s history, gathering all the information she could find about every aspect of the subject. She spent years going around Malta’s churches, analysing the techniques used in their existing ganutell collections, documenting and compiling all the hearsay and her findings about the art. Despite the tradition going back centuries, Kerr’s A Short History of Ganutell was the first history on the subject to be published in Malta.

She has also continued to share her knowledge and talents through the release of instructional books and videos, the workshops she hosts, and her TV appearances, which she believes have really helped spark the revival of the craft in Malta.

“I’ve had hundreds of students over the years, but the artists are few,” she says, pinpointing the details in composition, colour, and mounting that separate the copycat craftsmen from the singular artists.

The fascination with Kerr’s work goes far beyond Malta’s shores. Students have flown in from England, Portugal, Ukraine, and Russia to spend intensive, week-long workshops picking her brain on the intricacies of the artform.

There has also been great interest from Japan, perhaps unsurprising given the zen-like focus required for creating these intricate artificial flowers. Some of her Japanese students have gone on to place within prestigious art competitions, and popular Tokyo fashion house Comme des Garçons also came knocking at her door. Kerr created the bespoke ganutell brooches featured on the label’s collection modelled at Paris Fashion Week. The project remains one of her career highlights.

And it’s not just the world that has come to Kerr; she herself is always keen to remain a consummate ambassador for the Maltese artform, even if duty calls while on her holidays.

“I always take my work with me. I can’t stay without ganutell. It’s like my medicine,” she says with a laugh.

On one trip to America to visit her daughter, Kerr realised she had forgotten to pack some essential ganutell materials. Unwilling to make do without, her daughter drove her quite some distance to a handicrafts store to stock up. Here, Kerr fell into conversation with the store manager who was curious why she was looking for a particular gauge of silver wire – not a popular purchase among the store’s mostly beadworker and costume jeweller clientele.

So Kerr dug out some photos from her bag and began explaining. The manager “went crazy” for ganutell and Kerr was invited back the next day to hold an impromptu workshop, which saw an impressive turnout of staff and hobbyists eager to learn all about this curious craft.

It’s only polite not to disclose a lady’s age, but suffice it to say that Kerr is now well past retirement age. She’s still hard at work producing one-of-a-kind pieces and is currently in the midst of writing and researching her fourth book. And while she has scaled back her teaching efforts, she continues to mentor a handful of dedicated students.

Are there any signs she’ll be slowing down?

“Well, I used to get up out of my chair at one o’clock in the morning, but obviously not anymore,” she says matter-of-factly. “But I won’t retire from ganutell, not until my hands become stiff or my eyesight is gone.”