Where It Begins
The greenhouse. The archive. The long wooden table.
The Studio
Overhead, dried vines and botanical specimens hang from the rafters like a living ceiling — hydrangea, lunaria, seedheads, things that still have color after they have no more life to give. Below, on a long, scarred wooden table, the work happens. Pressing, casting, examining, waiting. Always some version of waiting.
The Studio is not a tidy place. It is a working place, which is different —
a space that has been shaped by decades of devotion
into something that could not exist anywhere else.
The Archive
There are drawers upon drawers — flat-file museum specimen cases that have been filled over many years with botanical material sorted by type, by color, by the memory of where each thing was growing when it was gathered.
Every bloom that enters this archive is catalogued not by name but by what it said when you looked at it long enough. The system only makes sense to the person who built it, which is the point of any real archive.
The Material
Hydrangea sorted from dark violet to the palest blush. Baby's breath. Dried rose petals in stages of transformation — from saturated to translucent, from bloom to specimen. Things that have been pressed for months and things that arrived from the garden this morning.
The material is the archive. The archive is the practice. The practice is a form of attention that most people never find a reason to develop. Luli found every reason.
Every piece cures in natural sunlight. Not a lamp, not a box — the actual sun, arriving at whatever angle it chooses on that particular day, in that particular season. The work moves on the sun’s schedule. Not mine.
There are no molds here. Each piece is hand-built: bezels and walls constructed around the botanical material itself, the structure following what the flower needs — not the other way around. The plant arrives as it is. The piece is built to hold it.
To say I control this process would be misleading. The season opens and closes its possibilities. The plants come when they come. Some pieces take weeks. Some have been arriving for years.
I am, in the most literal sense, along for the ride.
Every piece begins outside — in the growing, in the watching, in the understanding of what a particular plant is doing in this particular year. The studio is where the collaboration continues. The garden is where it starts.