botanical design

WHAT DO YOU DO?

OndineABotantBasedDesignStudio

I am sure many of you have watched Ondine morph and evolve over the past three years unwed to a specific trade or title. Wearing a few too many hats. It’s irritating I know. Bad for business, most definitely. When I catch fright at the question, “what do you do?,” I know it’s time to get my story straight.

I was one of the lucky ones and knew I wanted to be an artist as soon as I left the womb and landed in my mother’s hands. Hands so capable of creation sometimes I think she created my hands just to make through me. A seamstress, a jeweler, an assemblage sculptor, a painter, and a poet. So the apple fell. I have bounced around medium to medium my entire existence and enjoy bouncing. I have always learned with my hands and have always wanted to keep learning. Organic material however seems to be my constant. And one that I know I will keep learning from.

My first job beyond my three months as an ice cream scooper was working for a gardener. I spent eight seasons gardening and each season brought new knowledge and new plants and blooms to venerate.

Ondine began as a need to bring creation into a career. It began as a desire to tell a story. A desire to create sacred space. A desire to cultivate marvel and harvest presence. And a desire to grow. Over the past three years these worlds, my art background and my botanical background have morphed into one to define the finally honed but ever evolving Ondine.

WE ARE A BOTANY-BASED DESIGN STUDIO. —And by we I mean myself and hopefully my future team of employees when I make it big but for now just a facade/manifesting of this business of mine being bigger than myself— We offer floral design and styling for events, accounts and photoshoots in Seattle and beyond. As well as interior plant design and styling for residential and commercial spaces. We bring the outside in.

And I am so damn grateful for the work that we do.


DRIFT WOOD

ONDINEdriftwood

Driftwood seems like an intrinsic love, having grown up on an island and a boat. All the people I love dearly are weathered soft by the sea. I think I come back to it again and again as a medium because it reminds me of our bones. How one day we will all be the same, softened by time. Only our most elemental lines preserved. And then my driftwood endeavors cause me to saw through a piece and I am able to identify a limb just by the smell of the saw dust. And I’ll jump about like I have cracked open a geode at the scent of balsam fir. These are the things I muse about.

Driftwood. Old bones. Salt licked. Sun stripped. Out to sea. I love you. I have always loved you. And I’ll keep loving you again and again.