Inside Gulbaaz: Hanna Zahory on Botanical Monsters, Flower Play and Starting Again

My name is Hanna, I’m currently based in Asheville, NC. I call my practice “gulbaaz”, which roughly translates to "flower play" or "one who plays with flowers" in Farsi. To me, play is synonymous with freedom. I feel most free when I’m playing with flowers. Life can be too loud and too fast most days, but flowers help slow things down for me and bring everything into focus.

After burning out from almost twenty years in the nonprofit sector, I decided to take a sabbatical and was hoping to find a more creative career. I’ve always been more creatively inclined, but like a lot of eldest daughters of immigrant families, I was encouraged to pursue a more conventional career path.

During my sabbatical, I was focusing mostly on collage art. I considered landscape design, but scratched that off my list because I wanted to keep gardening for myself and not turn it into a career. I got a part-time job at a local flower shop just to add some structure to my day and that brought everything into focus. Floristry merged my passion for art and gardening into one practice. It wasn’t easy work; most days after a shift or a wedding, I was physically drained. But it was always so satisfying. I couldn’t get enough.

Once I decided that floristry was something I wanted to pursue, I staged with Sage in London as part of their Future Flowers initiative, which they offer to encourage people of color to pursue floral design and creative careers. I came back to Asheville and worked with Pollen for a while as an apprentice and since then, I’ve been privately developing my own portfolio and practice as I slowly transition from Asheville to Baltimore, MD.

I have been really into single-variety designs lately. Celosia took over my garden this year, and that’s how this really started. I made a sculptural piece with only celosia, I call it a “monster” because it looks like a little botanical monster. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve made so far. And it’s aging beautifully and dropping 100 seeds a minute. Watching it change every day has made it more than a beautiful object and I want to explore incorporating the passing of time into my designs more.

I’m also really interested in using flowers as a way to call attention to important issues. I’ve seen a lot of florists online who do floral street art and I love it so much. And I think the conversation around boycotting apartheid flowers is incredibly important, not only because of the solidarity it calls for, but because I think it hones in on the importance of hyper intentional consumption. I’m excited to see my work with Gulbaaz evolve to incorporate the causes and values I hold close.

Mania. Joking, kinda. I have about one week a month where my brain is rapidly firing ideas. Then, I get about two weeks a month where I can act on some of those ideas. And then the final week I just need to sequester myself from the world in silence to recover.

It always starts with an image in my head that stems from inspiration from something non-floral or a specific flower or material I want to work with. When I’m actually working on bringing it into being, I almost always take apart what I’m working on at least once and re-do it. A lot of times, I think I’m done and then I walk by it over the next couple days adjusting or even taking it apart AGAIN. Only time will tell if that’s because I’m still new to this or if that’s just me, always reiterating. It’s rare that the final design looks exactly like what I envisioned, and that’s the most exciting part for me.

I’ve been really into making those concrete bases with steel wire lately. That mechanic has helped me get more comfortable working with chicken wire too. I really enjoy the process of figuring out and building the mechanics as much as I do the design part.

As for materials, I am really into found florals and materials. One of my favorite recent designs was made entirely out of materials I found either in my garden or around my neighborhood. If I see a cool stick while walking my dogs, it’s coming home with me. Especially if it’s covered in moss.

Visually, I’m in this weird place of being attracted to both negative space and really dense layering. I love when there's one weird little stem with a lot of space around it, but I also love layering colors and textures until everything starts to feel like this magical tangle of nature in a vessel. I guess I'm interested in both extremes, and in figuring out how to navigate what I’m attracted to as intentionally as possible so my work finds its own voice.

In most things. I feel no shame in admitting that I watch a lot of television and movies, so obviously that’s a huge source of inspiration. I think being into sculptural design has made me more attentive to architecture, both human-made and natural. Photography is a big part of my creative process and being married to a photographer is very convenient. So I’m always drawing inspiration from his eye, but also from so many of the brilliant artists I’m lucky to know.

And gardening is a constant source of inspiration. There is something very different about encountering a plant in the garden, where it has its own rhythm and behavior, versus encountering it as a material that has been cut and packaged commercially. A florist I worked with once told me to look at how plants grow in nature to guide how I design. It took me a while to really understand what she meant by that, but when I finally started seeing it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

That, just like my creative process, everything is made up of cycles. I’ve always been a bit of a morbid person, and flowers and plants have helped me see that quality as not inherently negative.

There’s something almost mystical about an artist working with an impermanent medium like flowers. And, you know, as a woman turning 40 next year, I won’t lie and say I don’t have the occasional mini crisis about aging. But flowers help ground me in embracing the change, cycles, and impermanence of my own life, too.

I mean, I'm still figuring out so much myself, but I think the one thing that's helped me most is to just do the thing. Imposter syndrome be damned. Stop being afraid to mess up. Share your work even if you think it's not ready. It's part of the process. Your skill and your eye develop through doing, not through waiting until you're good enough to begin.

I think I’d give that advice to anyone who is hesitating to take a chance on themselves. I hesitated for a long time. I gave up a stable paycheck and health insurance to pivot to a new career at 37, and I wouldn't change it for the world. It's not that I don't face challenges now, but at least they're challenges of my own; ones that, when I overcome them, add another brick to the foundation of the life I actually want to live, instead of the one I was prescribed to live.