A Louisiana Sculptor Immortalizes Southern Flowers

For New Orleans-based sculptor Bradley Sabin, there’s no such thing as too many magnolias; he has a Japanese magnolia in his yard at home, and he’s made tens of thousands of ceramic magnolia blossoms glazed in deep reds, pinks, whites, and metallic blacks. “I have several flower forms I use, but people always gravitate to magnolias,” he says, “and this is a way to bring that nature inside.” These flowers take a prominent place in his exhibition titled Botanica, which runs through January at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, a museum focused on displaying ceramic arts within its unique architectural space. Nearly two-thousand handmade and dark-glazed magnolia blooms sweep across the curved walls around Sabin’s other sculptures, cage-like, human-form-inspired pieces filled with leaves or flowers. “I’m always looking at the architecture of a space and thinking about what would a plant do if it was growing there,” Sabin says. See images of the Botanica exhibition and other magnolias and wild hibiscus flowers that Sabin has arranged in galleries and private homes across the country.