Gillian Wearing takes inspiration from Bruegel in creating her Christmas wrapping paper

This is a repeated pattern from a photograph I took this year. It's based on a Bruegel painting and I called it People, in homage to those old paintings in which every flower is treated like an individual. I had to source a lot of fake flowers for my bouquet, as there are plenty of bad ones on the market. I initially worked with a florist, then realised I had to do it myself – because I wanted it to look very particular. It took me two weeks; there was a lot of playing with wires and florist's foam, getting each flower to have its own space and still work as a whole. As a pattern, it has a certain hypnotism. It almost has the shape of a Christmas tree when it's in repeat: you can't really see what it is. I didn't make this specifically for Christmas, but it makes me think of those 1970s special edition Christmas gift chocolate boxes, like Milk Tray, which were based on classical paintings of flowers or landscapes. They remind me of Christmas more than tinsel does.