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"We are a landscape of all we have seen."

“We are a landscape of all we have seen.”

Photo Credit: Sky Mirror (1982–83) PHOTOGRAPHY BY TAKASHI YASUMURA FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE; © 2015 THE ISAMU NOGUCHI FOUNDATION AND GARDEN MUSEUM, NEW YORK/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK   “We are a landscape of all we have seen.” — Isamu Noguchi

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5-10-5: Horticulturist, Garden Designer, Nursery Owner Helen O'Donnell of Bunker Farm

5-10-5: Horticulturist, Garden Designer, Nursery Owner Helen O’Donnell of Bunker Farm

Interview by Eric Hsu Photography by Helen O’Donnell (unless otherwise noted) I first became aware of Helen O’Donnell through her blog(www.anemonetimes.blogspot.com) where I had enjoyed reading about her gardening adventures in New England and aboard. I finally got to meet her briefly in person when she came down to volunteer at Chanticleer a few years ago, and had fun seeing gardens with her…

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"Beautiful Gardens" - Christopher Bailey

“Beautiful Gardens” – Christopher Bailey

Hawthorne Blossom Near Rudston (2008) by David Hockney. Beautiful gardens. “Just so magnificent. I love dipping in and out of these different, really quite intense worlds, which people have created within other worlds. It’s extraordinary to see how people adapt and live in these really quite extreme ways”. ~Christopher Bailey, former designer of Burberry, in Travel Almanac

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Candy Cane Sorrel

Oxalis strikes fear and loathing in gardener for its weedy nature in gardens – in Mediterranean gardens, Oxalis pes-caprae (Bermuda buttercup) is the chief bane while in temperate gardens, Oxalis corniculata (creeping woodsorrel) and O. stricta (common yellow woodsorrel) challenge the most persistent and patient minds. As with cultivated plants, it takes only one or two villains to tar what would…

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Interview by Eric Hsu

Photography by Aviva Rowley (except credited otherwise)

A born and bred-Brooklynite, Aviva Rowley studied fine arts in Cooper Union during which she worked as a florist and continued to do so after graduation. Desiring something less temporal, Rowley turned to ceramics as a medium for holding flowers. She builds her vessels backwards, using her floristry background as an inspiration, and because her work is handmade, no piece is uniform and one of a kind. Texture and shape dictate her style while the matte black glaze unifies it. Please visit her site (www.avivarowley.com) or IG: @avivarowley.

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For someone whose taste tends towards macabre, your ease and preference with clay as an artistic medium seem worlds away because clay, once fired, does not project rigor mortis. Clay feels alive and vital within one’s hands, hence why did you elect to work with it?

I never really thought of myself as macabre necessarily.  It’s funny because clay, while it is alive and vital in one’s hands while wet, once you fire it, it definitely does project rigor mortis. Frozen in time. A huge part of why I started to make ceramics was the experience of building these huge events as a florist, just to watch everything die within a day or two. I wanted to create something more permanent and unchanging as a vessel for things to grow, fade, eventually die…

My parents have been a huge inspiration to me throughout my life.  My mom is a psychologist and self-taught ceramist as well.  I grew up playing with clay, and water and plants and weeds and dirt, with the backdrop of the wild city skyline.  My father is a brilliant painter and scholar, who definitely leans towards the darkness.  They both have been an incredible influence in my life as a creator. I grew up in Brooklyn and my kiln is still at my parents’ house, in the house I grew up in, next to my mother’s wild overgrown flower garden.

Constance Spry, perhaps the fore runner of the wild untamed floral style popular now, worked closely with Fulham Pottery in London to design and develop a series of ceramics for floral work. How did your florist training shape your perception towards ceramics, and has it influenced the form you prefer to work with?

It has completely changed how I think of the “vessel,” I consider what goes in my vessels while I am building them.  I like to create lips and shapes that will speak to flowers.  Some of my favorite forms I’ve built dictate the way the flowers fall – the slit vase, for example, lets flowers fall in a really elegant mohawk.

She-oaks (Allocasuarina) drape around one of Rowley’s vessels like strung fishing nets. Styling and Photo Credit: Phillip Huynh

There needs to be a conversation between the vessel and what you put in it.  Our mutual friend Phil has been one of my biggest inspirations.  He would hate that I’m saying this, but he’s really been my muse for the past few years.  I make vessels thinking about how he would use them, I add snakes and handles and knobs and gaps for him to twist around.  While my own floral work is very simple, when I build a vessel I imagine so many possibilities – yet I’m always surprised how different florists use them.

A cascade of Clematis seedheads from another Rowley vessel in a friend’s nursery greenhouse. Styling and Photo Credit: Phillip Huynh

Many of my dearest friends are still florists, which is a fascinating resource.  I am working on a collaboration with another of my floral friend Sophia Moreno-Bunge.  She lives in California so we have been doing a snail mail back and forth.  Making vessels with her in mind has been such a fun experiment, and I’m creating forms that I never would have imagined otherwise.

In addition, you have started a Keiki-Club “to create an open social community for friends and flora fanatics to come together and grow plants, share knowledge, and trade collections”. Does this exposure to different plants and individuals besotted with them inspire your work in interesting directions? 

One of the first ceramic pieces I built was a hanging saucer because it was an answer to a plant problem that had not been answered before.  Being a part of such a positive community, where people can get together and tell stories, and introduce one another to new things… I never thought of it as an inspiration to my pottery, but now that I think of it, it is. I tend to like older plants, ones that have a past, and have been growing and adapting to their environments.  I like to imagine my vessels as homes.

Photo Credit: Phillip Huynh

Some ceramicists experiment regularly with glazes because they feel that the functionality, which underwrites the vessel form, is an artistic limitation. You have deliberately kept your glazes to a matte black or a weathered beige despite how varied you have manipulated the forms. 

I’ve always created intentional limitations in my art.  I chose the gun metal / matte black glaze because it really speaks to flowers, and definitely lets me experiment more wildly with my shapes.  When you see my vessels in person, there are a lot of slight imperfections in glazes; I’ve actually been experimenting a lot with different textures while keeping the black as a basic language.

  Photo Credit: Phillip Huynh

I like how they appear as silhouettes, and work well on their own… when you add plants or flowers it adds a whole other dimension which is generally out of my control.

If an Aviva Rowley ceramic was a plant or garden, what would it be?

I would be an undiscovered underwater ruin, left alone for so many years and enveloped in overgrowth. My partner said I’d be Psychotria elata… look it up!

Thank you for the interview Aviva!

Ceramicist Aviva Rowley Interview by Eric Hsu Photography by Aviva Rowley (except credited otherwise) A born and bred-Brooklynite, Aviva Rowley studied fine arts in Cooper Union during which she worked as a florist and continued to do so after graduation.

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Ceramicist Alana Wilson

Interview by Eric Hsu Photography by Phillip Huynh ** Her exhibit “T:  Exploration & Experience of the Teabowl”- with Romy Northover (pictures featured here) goes until  November 26 at FLOATING MOUNTAIN 239 W72nd St, New York NY 10023. Pieces are available for purchase and can be viewed at https://www.floating-mountain.com   Swimming brings one’s body with the water’s buoyancy, yet the process of…

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Ceramicist Simone Bodmer-Turner

Interview by Eric Hsu. Currently the ceramicist-in-residence at Saipua, Red Hook, Brooklyn, Simone Bodmer-Turner has been turning beautiful singular pieces in earthly tones and with natural imperfections. The irregularities of their shapes and textures give her ceramics an idiosyncratic feel not replicated in commercial, wheel-thrown pieces. Simone’s first forays into ceramics began with jewelry…

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Fashioned, flawed, and finished from the Earth Ceramicists and gardeners are bonded by the same element: the earth they mold into vessels or cultivate for plants.

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The Milkweed by Cecil Cavendish "The milkweed pods are breaking, And the bits of silken down Float off upon the autumn breeze Across the meadows brown." - Cecil Cavendish .

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5-10-5: Gina Price of Pettifers Garden

5-10-5: Gina Price of Pettifers Garden

I first met Gina after I saw her garden on the front cover of the 2007 Good Gardens Guide and then reached out to schedule a visit in person. On weekends when I wasn’t occupied with my postgraduate research, I would often drive out to visit historic houses, gardens, and nurseries. Nonetheless, a date and time are agreed upon and I tentatively knocked on the door upon which I had embarrassingly…

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Book Review: Sowing Beauty: Designing Flowering Meadows from Seed by James Hitchmough

Book Review: Sowing Beauty: Designing Flowering Meadows from Seed by James Hitchmough

by Eric Hsu Together with his colleague Nigel Dunnett whose work at the Barbican Center in London is his most visible work, James Hitchmough have put Sheffield University on the map for their pioneering work in plant communities and their horticultural application in public spaces. While Henk Gerristen, Piet Oudolf and and Piet Oudolf have respectively publicized the ecological-based tenets of…

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5-10-5: Ben Stormes, Curator and Horticulturist for the UBC Botanical Garden's North American Collections

5-10-5: Ben Stormes, Curator and Horticulturist for the UBC Botanical Garden’s North American Collections

Interview conducted by Eric Hsu Photography by Ben Stormes, Janet Davis, and Eric Hsu Please introduce yourself. I am Ben Stormes, and I am currently the Curator & Horticulturist for the North American Gardens at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden, located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The arts or horticulture. Arts-y horticulture, is that an appropriate answer? Given…

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5-10-5: Matt Lobdell, Head of Collections and Curator, The Morton Arboretum

5-10-5: Matt Lobdell, Head of Collections and Curator, The Morton Arboretum

Interview conducted by Eric Hsu Photography by Matt Lobdell   Matt Lobdell taking notes on a clipboard during the 2015 plant hunting expedition in Alabama. Please introduce yourself Matt Lobdell, Head of Collections and Curator, The Morton Arboretum The arts or horticulture? I appreciate the arts, but I’d have to say horticulture! How did you become fascinated with plants? My fascination with…

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Curators in Gardens by Eric Hsu What does a curator do in a garden? It is a common question visitors ask during meet and greet sessions.

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Floral Fridays: Antipodean Arrangement The seedheads of Dietes grandiflora (South African iris relative commonly known as fortnight lily) break up the round contours of the protea flowers and Corymbia ficifolia capsule.

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Book Review: The Amaryllidaceae of Southern Africa

Book Review: The Amaryllidaceae of Southern Africa

by Eric Hsu While South America claims the distinction for the center of diversity for the amaryllis family, South Africa holds it own with 18 genera and approximately 240 species. Ever since the Europeans began navigating new oceanic trading routes in search of new colonies, the ornamental appeal of the South African Amaryllidaceae has been well known to gardeners. Foremost in advancing the…

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Book Review: Kniphofia: the complete guide by Christopher Whitehouse

Book Review: Kniphofia: the complete guide by Christopher Whitehouse

by Eric Hsu One outcome of the European colonization in South Africa was the establishment of botanic gardens and the affiliated research centers. Today Kirstenbosch National Botanic Garden can trace its founding back to 1913 when a British expatriate Henry Harold Pearson, who had moved down in 1903 to chair the botany department at South African College (University of Cape Town), agreed to serve…