New York landscape firm Harrison Green is the name behind some of the city’s most interesting public and private gardens—on rooftops and terraces, and tiny, hidden backyards. Longstanding members of the Gardenista Architect/Designer directory, the team, run by husband-and-wife duo Damien and Jacqueline Harrison, is full service: they specialize in not only designing, but planting and maintaining their work year-round (The Row and Mark Jacobs are clients).
The Harrisons now stand ready to furnish and accessorize outdoor spaces: Galerie Green, their new online-only emporium, presents hard-to-find antique and vintage garden elements, from 1920s carved wooden mushrooms to carefully refinished French sunburst chairs and stone tables. Their offerings, they say, are about “craftsmanship, proportion, and patina” and the case for “longevity and authenticity over the new and disposable.” Caveat: this is a weighty collection in every sense of the word and prices are steep. Join us for a look at the initial offerings presented in Harrison Green’s own Brooklyn studio garden.
What happens when you assemble and photograph found bits of nature every single day for 12 years and counting? Mary Jo Hoffman calls her art—as well as her blog and her new book—Still and writes that her practice is not only “a respite from the enervating buzz of contemporary life,” but a way of paying attention. “Finding each day’s subject requires me to live more often than not in a heightened state of awareness that makes me extraordinarily happy.”
I can relate: I have a similar daily habit that evolved from collecting leaves on dog walks (see How I Became an Accidental Botanical Artist). But though we’re admiring much of the same foliage—I’m based in a bucolic patch of the Bronx and Mary Jo lives on three acres outside Minneapolis—our work is quite different.
Her photographs, whether of a single feather or an elaborate seed composition, have the satisfying completeness of solved equations. Mary Jo, you see, is a Stanford-educated applied mathematician and worked for 20 years as an aeronautical space engineer. “There will always be some engineering, more or less evident, behind what Mary Jo crafts of her materials, and what she crafts of herself,” writes her husband, Steve Hoffman, in the prologue to Still: The Art of Noticing.
Here, a look at some highlights from the book, which, when I last checked, was the best-selling volume from Phaidon Press’s spring catalogue.
Photography by Mary Jo Hoffman, courtesy of Phaidon Press.
Above: Mary Jo in her element. In a recent talk she gave at the New York Botanical Garden, Mary Jo confided she often sets out on morning walks with a coffee cup in hand and uses that as her collecting receptacle.
Still arose from a desire to develop a creative practice while her two kids were young. Mary Jo had just left her job as a rocket scientist and had patches of free time. Wanting to join an online art community, she decided to begin with photography, something she was already good at, and to spend time in nature. She committed to making her art daily for a year back in January 2012—and has never missed a day since. “It’s like my daily yoga; I find it too life-enhancing to stop.”
Above: A flatlay assemblage of box elder samaras. Early on, Mary Jo set a few rules for herself: she sticks with a white posterboard background, works only with found nature—”minimally manipulated”—and, after photographing her creations, erases the slate.
I’ve known artist Emma Kohlmann since she was a kid and am a huge fan. I’m not the only one. Her beguiling, dreamlike paintings were discovered on Instagram 10 years ago when she was in her mid-twenties and she now has an impressive CV of shows near and far (she’s represented in NYC by Silke Lindner and in Copenhagen by V1 Gallery).
Emma began by self-publishing zines and continues to make printed matter (with her sister, Charlotte Kohlmann, she runs Mundus Press in Northampton, Massachusetts, where the two live). Emma also frequently collaborates with other creatives—with Simone Bodmer-Turner, for instance, she produced a sell-out line of vases, and she’s currently designing tableware for a major Danish brand. Emma Kohlmann Watercolors, a large-format monograph on her work of the past decade, is being published any minute by Anthology.
Today, we’re featuring her latest collab: the Emma Kohlman Lamp Collection for online art and design shop Slow Roads. The brand’s founders, Catherine Costanza and Evan Dublin, supplied Emma with custom canvas lampshades to paint. They sized the shades to pair with vintage tree root lamps that they ferreted out on road trips in Upstate New York, Seattle, and California, and carefully restored. The sculptural collection debuted on the Slow Roads site on March 11, with prices starting at $1,450. Take a look. There are only six lamps (and three have already been sold), so speak up if you want one.
Above: Here are the just-finished shades in Emma’s studio, in a former paper mill in Western Massachusetts. Emma grew up in Riverdale, in the Bronx; she studied at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. and has lived in the area ever since (but has friends and toeholds around the world).
Emma typically works spontaneously without advance sketches, and has developed her own benevolent universe of reclining figures, floating faces, plants, and animals. She painted the lampshades with watered-down acrylics; each is one-of-a-kind and displays evolving patterns and scenes.
Above: Catherine and Evan of Slow Roads are artist-designers themselves, based in Rochester, NY; their shop showcases contemporary and vintage housewares, all rooted in nature. Like the shades, each of the lamp bases is a one-off. This one is Lamp 4.
