By Terry Godfrey AIFD, EMC
I was honored to be asked to participate with AIFD North East Chapter at the 2024 flower show. The theme for the AIFD exhibit was “Gathered” to illustrate how flowers come together from all corners of the globe and how AIFD members gather to be “United by Flowers” in a community of designers to produce floral art.
Each team was assigned a floral growing area to interpret into a composition. I was assigned Australia for team that included Sue Bain AIFD and Linda Weinberger CFD (unofficially, my husband and sister) and a slew of volunteers from Bucks County Community College. The assignment was to create a structure, use the flowers from that growing region and include elements that would allow your growing region to be easily identifiable. My exhibit “space” was an 8’ x 8’ black wall.
I chose to represent Australia using Aboriginal fabrics and themes. The inspiration for my exhibit was the Australian imported fabric titled “Dancing Spirit.” The description of the fabric included a story about how the spirits were dancing to pay respects to Mother Earth and the sacred land. The idea was to illustrate spirits dancing to the music of the digeridoo (oversized Australian flutes made with bamboo). The composition juxtaposed the static lines in the pvc pipes against the rhythmic motion of the Australian botanical materials. We made circular tatami structures to pick up the circular patterns in the fabric.
Suspending the pipes seemed straight forward but turned into an interesting challenge. After several trial runs and damaged pipes, we ended up using floating shelf hardware to support the pipes. The hardware also worked well to support the water bottles used as water sources. I used a technique with masking tape to cover the pipes with an organic type of texture (thank you so much Gerry Toh AIFD for introducing this) and to allow paint to adhere to the pvc.
I used Freeform software to sketch out the design. This allowed me to try out various configurations and to draw the pipes and tatamis to scale. I tried to focus on Fibonacci proportions for the groupings and spacing of the material used.
Many thanks to Renee Tucci AIFD, 2024 chair for the NE installation and Ron Mulray AIFD who coordinates the annual exhibit with PHS. We took Bronze in the show!