Flowers have always had a way of tying us to place. With brief and often sudden blooming periods, each season’s offerings punctuate the passing of time—a way to track memory and growth. As we hurtle towards the summer solstice, FDK Florals is providing floral enthusiasts with a more intentional lens through which to approach their seasonal favorites through an online floral arrangement workshop with the natural dyer, Cara Marie Piazza.
The Forms and Gestures Workshop is a part of Cara Marie Piazza’s Summer School Share, which collaborates with herbalists, artists and natural dyers to bring skills like herbal apothecary and suminagashi marbling into participants’ homes via online workshops. While this is the Brooklyn-based floral design studio’s inaugural partnership with Piazza, the first-time collaborators are actually longtime friends that have bonded over a shared ethos and passion in their respective practices. According to Piazza, the decision to work with Go Kasai and Fernando Kabigting was a natural step, “I was driven to ask Fernando to teach because I have been inspired by his seamless and intuitive way of arranging. I wanted to provide a floral class online for our international community that tied in with our combined love of embracing imperfection and creating meaningful moments.”
Under Kabigting’s tutelage, workshop attendees will receive a step-by-step introduction to the basics of flower arranging. Using locally grown and foraged materials, attendees will finish the course with an arrangement that reflects FDK’s commitment to using flowers to represent time, space and personality. Attendees can expect to work with a selection of in-season seeded grasses, fruiting branches, clusters of yarrow and poppies that have been carefully curated by FDK according to what can be foraged regionally in New York and sourced from local farms in the Hudson Valley.
For FDK, incorporating foraged materials helps to create a more nuanced arrangement and practice, “There is an open yet measured unpredictability that exists within foraging,” Kabigting tells MOLD, “Materials at times call out to you without your seeking them out – the approach all stems from the deep desire to cultivate a serene imperfection.”
Welcoming imperfection is a foundational aspect of FDK’s work, their arrangements an alignment with nature’s own tendencies. For Kabigting, this means using blooms and floral materials that include “nature’s happy accidents” whether they be spotted petals or withered stems. “I love layered 360 conversations and adding a pause to my floral moments,” says Kabigting. In FDK’s workshop, attendees will learn how to focus on the materials’ imperfections to create new forms of representation.
FDK Florals Floral Workshop: Forms and Gestures will be held Thursday, July 29th, 2021 from 6PM-8PM. Register online here.
