By Ursula Gunther AIFD, EMC
I was very honored to be invited back to participate in Art in Bloom DC this year. It was my fourth consecutive year in a row! Each floral artist is allowed to choose their inspiration
piece from Anderson House’s collection of art pieces.
This year, I chose the headless Greco-Roman goddess statue outside in the garden as my inspiration. Initially, my design concept was to literally give her a “head” filled with flowers. As I thought deeper about her, I began thinking about how our states of mind can vary wildly on a daily basis. One moment, we can feel beautiful & strong and the next moment we can feel angry or envious or even sad. I decided to give the headless statue multiple heads. Each one I created represented different goddesses with vastly different states of mind. I further “explained” this without words to the viewers by my choice of colors, textures and of course the botanicals.
For example, the Medusa head was made of concrete and arrived grayish-white. I color shifted her and each of the heads with DM Color spray paint. The Medusa was yelling-mouth open, tongue visible—she was clearly the “anger & rage” head for me. I went with vibrant reds & warm gold along with red tillandsia air plants that resemble flames in my eyes, along with Black Pearl roses, Rubicon spray roses, red anthuriums red hypericum berries and some green trick dianthus.
The color & texture of florals really speak to me as an incredible translator of emotions.
I wanted viewers to feel & see the emotion through the flowers. Subsequently, with “sadness” I chose blues & purples because sadness can feel dark & vast. I also chose purple hydrangeas as they are flowers that carry a lot of visual weight in designs and sadness can feel very heavy.
As far as techniques are concerned, I didn’t use anything that was complicated. I used Oasis floral foam inside of each concrete planter head with Aquafoil at the base to help retain as much moisture in the foam for the flowers to access whilst being outside in the garden being admired. I had to come back every other day to check on them and hydrate/replace flowers as needed so they were looking their best.
In closing, my view as a floral designer is not only to create something unique & beautiful for my clients, I also want to ensure that the flowers are appropriate for the occasion and that they speak an unspoken words to the recipients and offer them a chance to stop and see how beautiful life can be in each shade, tone, tint, ruffle, spike & petal of a flower.
