Floral Designer at Primrose Point:

Florist turned metal sculptor creates 'art for living spaces'

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By Celene Adams

 

Primrose Point.

The name of the housing subdivision was fitting for a floral designer.

But nothing else in the under-construction model home seemed familiar to what Diane Lynn Aldrich, who creates "art for living spaces," had worked with before.

Usually, Aldrich, an independent contractor, combines exotic botanical flowers and sticks to create distinctively textured accent pieces for commercial and residential spaces -- a craft she's practiced for 12 years.

Not this time. Her assignment was to create a permanent installment for a wall in a 3,750-square-foot home that would be shown in a Parade of Homes tour.

It was a surface, not a space. And it wasn't even fully constructed yet.

"I didn't know the coloring or the lighting and I hadn't met the people, which is normally where I'd come in," she recalls.

She stared at the skeletal two-by-four structure where the wall she was to cover would stand.

"I just didn't see any flowers for this wall," she recalls.

Instead, she saw something "floating" -- a three dimensional copper and aluminum design, suspended above the wall's surface, with pieces of varying widths and weights, loosely linked, but not touching.

But the silversmiths, the tinsmiths and the patina specialists she visited to help her articulate her vision, all said, "It can't be done."

"Metal is too heavy to hang from a wall without a frame," they told her. "What you want is too fine to cut."

Despite the fact that she knew nothing about metal, Aldrich persevered.

"I thought, 'No way!' [A frame] would totally take away from the whole floating feel," she says. "I was determined to do this. I knew in my mind what I wanted to do."

So, eventually, she found a metalsmith who uses a water jet process to cut metal -- a process that preserves fine edges.

"The maximum in length she could cut was four-and-a-half feet," Aldrich recalls. Aldrich's piece was exactly that.

Things were looking up.

But that's when Aldrich's vision met the limitations of the medium.

Copper is much heavier than aluminum. So, she used different gauges of the metals to compensate for the weight imbalance.

Then, because she wanted a buoyant effect and didn't want to lay the metal flat upon the wall, she had to figure out a way to affix the metal without screwing it in.

So she dubbed an AutoCad pattern of her design sketch onto Mylar, a type of heavy plastic film. She laid the Mylar onto the metal pieces, marking where the contact points with the wall would be onto the film.

Then she pasted the Mylar onto the wall and inserted five-inch screws into the two-by-fours at those points. After the construction crew had dry walled around these, leaving the screws sticking out about an inch and a half, she fit her metal pieces onto them, using plumbers cuff links affixed to the back of the metal with epoxy.

It worked. But there was one final step.

Metal tarnishes if it isn't treated. So Aldrich asked a metal buffer to polish a small copper piece to see what it would look like.

"It was almost like an opaque film was removed from the metal and there was all this beautiful, shiny color," Aldrich says. "And so that's how I left it. There's no chemical put on it."

The effect was just as Aldrich had intended -- a study in contrasts: metal that seems to float.

"Floating means movement," Aldrich says. "The curves, the angles, ... there's no beginning or end."

The composition appears to be "woven" together with one long piece that swells, wave-like, through serpentine and triangular shapes -- a feature Aldrich insisted on, even though she had to modify her design to achieve it -- joining three shorter pieces together rather than using one long one.

Instead of weaving the piece under and over the others, "I certainly could have put the two metals on top and been done," but "I wanted to retain the integrity of the design," she says.

"The design lent itself to not having that restrictive, static feeling," she explains. However, "When you learn something new, you need to be open to what the principles are and where you need to make modifications. There's a way you can still keep what you believe in but also get the job done so to speak."

Once she separated the long piece into three, she was still able to effect an illusion of continuity because "The weaving allowed it to ever so slightly not touch," which contributes to the sensation of fluidity.

The weight discrepancy between the copper and metal pieces in her Primrose Point installment also contributes to the piece's sense of vitality. "They're all different but they look the same," she says. "Otherwise it would be a stagnant piece but this way it keeps the flow moving."

As the aesthetic centerpiece of the house, Aldrich had to design her sculpture to complement the property's overall structure. Yet, when she began to work, she says she wasn't sure why her design felt appropriate for the space. All she had to work with was the blueprint and the builder's proposed color scheme. "I didn't have my [usual] clues but I did -- intuitively," she says, adding that she accommodated the builder's overall plan by using the blueprint scale and, later, by using copper pieces, a material she'd noticed the builder had used as accents in other houses in the development.

But, essentially, Aldrich, knowing that the builder was familiar with her floral art, and so would expect her to stay true to her own style, kept it simple.

"I just think less is more and I think a subtlety for a space, that makes an impact and draws everything around it to where you notice it but you don't is more my style. ... There's a certain gracefulness I think art should have."

On the other hand, some of the pieces Aldrich does are "way punchy. But the environment and the energy of the [client] is probably that way," she says.

It took Aldrich 60 hours to complete the piece at Primrose Point and she charged about $5,000.

"I charge by the project," Aldrich says, noting that since this was her first metal piece, it was mostly a labor of love.

The house, at Paseo and Lowell in Albuquerque's far NE Heights, sold quickly. But for Aldrich, the reward for her labors is simply reflecting on her artistic journey from floral designer to metal sculptor.

Now she wants to combine the two, and she's beginning to explore creating metal flower vases and combining fresh flowers with metal-crafted shapes.

"I want to use a blow torch and start playing with color just for different purposes and seeing all the blues and greens that come out when you heat metal. It's endless," she says.

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