PERSONAL STATEMENT
Sarah Kenney, Vietnam, Architecture
Open. The Williamsburg Bridge at dawn, sunrise just beginning to illuminate the Manhattan skyline. Biking from Brooklyn to Manhattan this early in the morning, the feeling is luck - to see the streets empty, in a tireless city. Alone, riding north, until a single block of 28th street. Here, every store is open, every car is honking, every person is running. Buckets of color are swept into brown paper, bushels stuffed into taxis, and Eden disperses itself through the machinery of the New York City Flower District. Enter Sarah. I enter the Flower District by bike at 5 am to purchase wholesale cut flowers. As a senior designer for Sprout Studio, I transport, process, construct, and package these flowers into Dutch Master style bouquets, which are displayed, sold, moved, loved, trashed. Curtain.
Flowers bloom, and I chase them. I’ve chased them all over the world – from the arboretum in my hometown, to community gardens in Pittsburgh, from the New York Flower District to foraging landscapes in Alaska, from Tuscan castles to National Parks in Appalachia, from the streets of Paris to the savannahs in Kenya, from the pages of my thesis to the Flower Villages in Vietnam.
A bouquet, like a play, is consumed only as a highly controlled image. It is a dishonest moment of stability in the complicated life of a cut flower. Evolving for months, crossing continents and cultures, touching countless hands, machines, and architectures, a cut flower is enjoyed only in climax after its hero’s journey. Unconstrained curiosity has propelled me to constantly dig deeper and ask why? Layers of beauty are peeled away, exposing a global supply chain with the same problems that characterize all billion-dollar industries. Through my study of floriculture, I’ve discovered a world made from secret landscapes of extraction and celebration and corruption and dreams. A lifetime of exploratory work has culminated in a graduate thesis which explores the unusual intersection between vernacular architecture, violent conflict, and cut flower landscapes in Kenya’s cut flower enclaves.
This work has shattered my naive illusion about discovering something so beautiful, that it becomes non-political – and in a moment of cosmic irony, I have discovered the cut flower to be one of the most complex objects on earth, intersecting with ecological paradigms, global capitalism, classical ethics, neocolonial landscapes, and decadent beauty. Although not creative enough for me long term, my Natural Sciences B.S. impressed upon me a rigorous standard of research methods in ecology and botany. Similarly, while ambitious for a larger impact, my extensive background in community building as public garden coordinator in Knoxville, an Emergency Medical Technician at a free clinic in Manhattan, and a food security intern in Pittsburgh each influenced my human centric approach to the study of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. I am no longer employed in any of these fields, but my experiences allow me to speak their language, creating a unique ability to curate disconnected expertise.
My original intoxication with flowers has matured into ambivalence, a word often misunderstood to mean apathy. This German word comes from the Latin prefix ambi, meaning both, and valeo, meaning strong; Miriam Webster defines ambivalence as “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings toward an object person or action.” I am attracted and repulsed by floriculture, and this tension draws me in more deeply. A cut flower is a gesture of romance, an object of extraction, a driver of urban and economic development, and symbol of delicate beauty, a window into worlds unlike my own, irreconcilably ambivalent, and infinitely interesting – this is why I study them.