Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Carly Glovinski. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Carly, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Opelske, Almanac, and the Wild Knoll Foundation Garden are three deeply intertwined projects that merge my roles as both artist and gardener. Together, they reflect years of inquiry into the materiality of flowers—what they mean as living things, symbols, specimens, and objects of care.
Opelske, my first public artwork now on view at Boston’s Commonwealth Pier, is a three-story pressed flower mosaic and pollinator garden. It bridges land and sea while bringing together glass, native plants, and themes rooted in my lifelong exploration of material and process. This is the first work where I fully embraced both of my practices—studio and garden—simultaneously. The pressed flower imagery began with real blooms grown and harvested from the Wild Knoll Foundation Garden at Surf Point, a site I developed in response to discovering the overgrown foundation of writer May Sarton’s former home. Inspired by her journals and the rhythms of her gardening life, I rebuilt the garden according to her house’s footprint. It’s now both a literal and symbolic foundation for much of my work.
The pressed flowers grown and tended there became source material for Almanac, my largest painted pressed flower work to date—spanning 100 feet at MASS MoCA. Organized chronologically by bloom time, Almanac is both a botanical calendar and a visual record of the New England growing season. It explores flowers not only as delicate symbols of memory—gifts given in moments of joy and grief—but also as crucial ecological agents supporting pollinators and plant lifecycles. To press a flower, I’ve come to realize, is to hold space for both.
While these projects each live in their own places—gallery, city stairwell, garden bed—they are intimately connected. One could not have happened without the others. They share not only material lineage (flower to press to paint to tile) but also a unified practice of observation, care, and attention.
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View the full interview at canvasrebel.com
