Meet the Makers Creating Sculptural Home Accents with Chainmail
Wretched Flowers founders Johnny Stanish and Loney Abrams produce bold lighting, room dividers, and wall hangings that pair the brutalist metal with floral and feminine embellishment
Wretched Flowers, the cult brand that has amassed a loyal following for their beaded chainmail creations, just opened their first-ever showroom in SoHo. Visitors enter through a graffiti-covered door and climb several flights of old-school New York stairs to reach the loft space, which Wretched Flowers shares with Petra Hardware. Here, they’re showing lighting, room dividers, and in-process tapestries inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” exhibition. “We spent a lot of time there, seeing how we could subvert certain things, and develop our own visual language around them,” explains Johnny Stanish, who founded Wretched Flowers with his wife, Loney Abrams.
The couple met while students at Pratt Institute, but the paths that led them there couldn’t have been more different. Stanish grew up in Great Falls, Montana. His mother was a respiratory nurse, and his father an artist who painted scenes of the West for local ranchers, often bartering paintings for basic services. “We were very poor. We lived in a shed that my parents converted into a small home,” says Stanish, who subsequently earned a BFA from the University of Montana, spent time in Portland, Oregon, and eventually moved to New York City to attend Pratt.
Abrams, meanwhile, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her father developed golf courses and helped lay the groundwork for what became the PGA Tour Champions. Her mother, a flight attendant, sourced Amish-made furniture and quilts in Pennsylvania to resell to Boston-area interior designers. After graduating from Colorado College with degrees in sociology and environmental science, Abrams moved to New Orleans, where she and friends opened a “drop-in art studio.” Making and exhibiting work there gave her the confidence to attend Pratt.
Both started as printmakers before shifting into sculpture and collaborating under the name Hotel Art. While still at Pratt, they staged guerrilla-style exhibitions in unexpected locations, images of which often outlived the installation itself. In many ways, Wretched Flowers grew naturally out of Hotel Art. Both projects were rooted in finding beauty and possibility in overlooked places, whether that meant staging exhibitions in ATM vestibules or foraging plants from the vacant lots surrounding their Brooklyn studio. Like many emerging artists, they supported themselves through a patchwork of jobs, including bartending, art handling, writing (Abrams was the editor in chief of Artspace Magazine for several years), and teaching at Pratt, where they both still work today.
The current incarnation of Wretched Flowers was spurred by a move out of Manhattan to Connecticut, where the couple had bought a house and were thinking about how to furnish it. Self-described “museum junkies,” Abrams and Stanish are especially enamored by the armor section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We saw a helmet that had chainmail coming off it and thought, ‘that would be such a cool lamp,’” recalled Abrams. “And we could combine the brutal, hard, masculine associations of chainmail with more feminine, floral, domestic associations with textile art. That’s how it all started.”
Today the duo, whose client list includes Nicole Fuller and Ken Fulk, split the creative responsibilities. Abrams tackles the metal, patina, and finishes, while Stanish does the beading, using glass, semi-precious stones, and even mother-of-pearl. He describes his contribution as “endurance-based—you have to be someone who can work on the same thing for a very long time and not get burned out.” Their floral floor lamp, for example, requires 40 hours of beading alone.
A recent fashion collaboration has perhaps inspired a new collection. “We’ve become interested in couture techniques that could be incorporated into interior design,” says Abrams. “The challenge now is how to evolve the chainmail and push it somewhere new.”