The Winter Blooms of Sayaka Wada
Meet the Artist Behind Our 2020 Holiday Gifts Collection
For our 2020 holiday gift collection, we wanted to offer a hopeful message amidst a difficult year. The collection’s theme, Winter Blooms, is meant to capture the promise of renewal contained in winter flower buds—and the enduring pleasures of fleeting moments, whether a bouquet of flowers or the bloom of a pour over. So it’s only natural we’d turn to our floral artist Sayaka Wada for inspiration.
A longtime Blue Bottle collaborator, Wada’s eye-catching arrangements have held center stage in our Northern California cafes for years. A Japan native and San Francisco Bay Area resident, she has an approach to flowers that inspires our approach to coffee. Put succinctly, Wada makes us think.
Like a great coffee, her floral arrangements are so visually arresting, they all but stop time. Defying gravity, they don’t just upend all our expectations, they make us reassess everything.
This is not pure coincidence: much as we draw inspiration from Japanese coffee traditions, Wada is inspired by her own childhood in Japan, where her father owned a kissaten, a coffee shop where he prepared every cup to order, one cup at a time.
Just as we hold that every aspect of coffee deserves close attention, she believes that all parts of a plant are worth seeing. Her gravity-defying sculptures often highlight a trail of stems or a tangle of roots as much or more than the flowers. She often magnifies them—literally—through deft use of a glass vase filled with water that becomes the center of the arrangement.
When we shared our holiday theme with her, she responded with gorgeous arrangements that encapsulated the theme of renewal in the year’s darkest months. Wada treasures winter as a regenerative time. “Everything is warm in winter—the light, the steam rising from coffee,” she says. Her artistry conveyed this warmth to us, in a year when we needed soulful inspiration, becoming the springboard for our holiday collection Winter Blooms. Building on her holistic view of the whole plant, for our collection she highlighted all phases of a plant’s life cycle, from seed to dried leaves.
We photographed Wada’s arrangements and shared the images with our design teams in the US and Japan. From the crimson and white of her blossoms to the gestural lines of verdant stems and buds, her colors became the designers’ palette, informing the look of this year’s mugs, drippers, and more. We also shared Wada’s sculptures with our collaborative partners, including Los Angeles-based ceramist Nancy Kwon, who created a bespoke Winter Blooms mug for us, hand-thrown to mimic the shape of a flower bud. Last but not least, our coffee sourcing team took Wada’s Winter Blooms to heart and chose two distinct floral-inspired coffees for our holiday lineup—an earthy blend and a floral single origin.
Now that the holiday season is here, from November 10 through the week of January 18, Wada is installing a new floral arrangement each week at our W. C. Morse cafe in Oakland. Every week we'll share photos of her work on bluebottlecoffee.com and @bluebottle on Instagram through the new year.
We talked to Wada recently about her work and what winter—and coffee—means to her.
Tell us about your relationship with coffee.
Coffee and flowers have always been together in my memory. When I was growing up [in Japan], my father had a kissaten, a cafe where he’d roast coffee and make one cup at a time to order. My mother did the floral arrangements that sat on the communal table. Her work was more free-form than mine—she liked the flowers to sway in the wind.
Coffee and flowers are also similar because both are ephemeral and bring you into the moment. They are short-lived joys—no matter how much I try, my arrangements will disappear in a very short time.
For our holiday collection, Winter Blooms, we wanted to offer a hopeful message of renewal after this difficult year. How did you go about designing your arrangements to bring this sense of renewal to life?
What became clear out of the many troubling situations we have all experienced is that we are all connected and that we need to nurture our connection.
I imagine winter as a time when life is ending one cycle while preparing for a new beginning. The arrangements I created are all imaginary scenarios where the beauty of ending and the beauty of beginning are embracing each other quietly. There are structural elements that are made using thread, which connect the element of a plant that has ended its cycle to the part of the plant that is starting to bloom. By connecting two different stages of plant life in one composition, my hope is to express the continuing cycle. It will always lead to a new beginning.
What has winter meant to you?
I spent my college days in the very northern part of Japan, which gets covered in snow—very cold, crisp, beautiful snow. I think of the warmth of the light. In winter, everything has a warmer tone. When you’re walking on the streets, the houses are all lit up. The flames from candles are warm. Even the steam coming from a coffee gives off warmth.
There is a certain kind of darkness and greyness, too, which I like because it's a good time to concentrate on thoughts or reading. It’s a time to be quiet, rather than active.
And how do flowers affect your sense of time?
When I look at flowers, it’s like they’re magic. They capture my heart and encourage me to explore and to start imagining. By doing that, I can go to a different space or time. I can access feelings or thoughts, and I can go to the past or future though those feelings.
It’s interesting you say that flowers make you think. Many of your arrangements are so visually arresting that they make us think, too. They sometimes seem to defy gravity, inviting a closer look.
Yes, my arrangements are often very structural. Maybe that’s in part because of how I work. I first work with an idea that comes to me. For Winter Blooms, it was how the cycle of plant life goes from shooting up in summertime to returning back to the earth in winter, before it all begins again. I wanted to convey that positive feeling of renewal. So I decided to connect these different stages of a plant’s life in the arrangements, using lightweight fishing wire to tie barren branches to buds.
It also felt important to highlight the negative space between the branches or blooms, which evokes the feeling of winter to me. These are blank spaces where I chose not to fill the space with lots of flowers or colors. I find the negative space beautiful, a space to wander freely. I hope that others see it as a space to wander, too.
Your use of negative space stood out in one arrangement in particular, of a tumbleweed and a bud emerging from it. Could you tell us about that work?
I have always been fascinated by tumbleweed. You see lots of it on the side of the road in the desert when you’re driving to LA. When I brought some home, the form began to open and go flat. They only keep that circular shape when they’re in motion, tumbling. I had to tie the branches with thread for it to keep its shape.
You created another sculpture that consists of maroon clematis flowers attached to what looks like a twisty branch with countless twiggy offshoots. A flurry of white seedpods are just below the flowers, fastened to the branch in a way to make your handiwork invisible. It feels so organic, like you could find such a branch on the side of a trail. And yet the juxtaposition of the flowers and seedpods make that impossible. How did you decide to pair these two different elements?
The seedpods come from the clematis flower. After blooming, each flower’s outer petals fall so that only the innermost wispy petals and stamen remains. Over time, the silky wisps dry into fluffy seedpods, in the way that dandelions do. When I came across some of these seedpods last winter, I found them so beautiful that I stored them.
So in these arrangements, I combined the winter stage of clematis with the flower, the summer stage. I was happy how Nick [the photographer] was able to capture these arrangements. Since the seedpods are so fuzzy and colorless, I wasn’t sure if they would show up in the image. But Nick did it. They look like snow.
Your work invites the viewer to slow down and even feel a kind of awe. How do you see flowers? What does their beauty mean to you?
Flowers don’t ask to be the center of attention, and yet they are beautiful.
When I think of flowers’ beauty, I think of people. All of us can find beauty in flowers. They stir something in us. The recognition of beauty is universal, no matter who we are. It’s one of the good things about human nature that we all share.
View the rotation of Sayaka’s Winter Bloom arrangements on our homepage. We are photographing her new arrangements, which she is updating weekly and are on display at Blue Bottle’s W. C. Morse cafe in Oakland, CA.
