Our friend Mary has a ritual of picking a flower or small bunch from a garden each day and placing them in a small bottle vase, documenting each with a photograph and short note. 

We were inspired by this daily habit and set out to create a vase for her flowers. We began a conversation about how to frame not only the physical object but the daily ritual itself.    

A new mental and emotional portrait is created every time Mary’s Vase is used.

Our design emerged from a consideration of ‘framing’, creating an empty shape that delicately frames each flower held in a small removable vase hung from the frame. 

In this way, we wanted the empty frame to also be a gentle reminder to the user that their action was needed to “complete” it, to remove something from nature in order to contemplate it’s beauty, structure, and ability to bring joy on a regular basis. Our hope is that users will begin to more fully appreciate the various cycles and seasons as well. 

Our design criteria included creating a series of frames that could reflect types of flowers found in a particular region. The frame shapes and sizes would be geometrically interlinked.