Challenged by orchids? Chaba Conrad creates lifelike specimens that will last forever

It‘s like stepping into a paradise.

There are orchids everywhere—in colourful pots, mounted on driftwood, even festooning the wall in unique frames. I stop dead in my tracks and start to grin. Chaba Conrad, holding her dog Fifi, responds with proud delight to my oohs and ahs.

Chaba loves flowers—her full name, Chaba-ket, translates from Thai as “the hibiscus flower crown of the Buddha’s head”—and does grow some marvelous plants, but this exultation of orchids and more are all hand-created by her; each one carefully constructed of special clay she makes herself, and then hand painted before being arranged in displays for table or shelf or wall.

She shows me into her kitchen area, where the counter is awash in bowls and vases of partially made orchids, each one so lifelike that I want to scoop them all up and run. There are also finished plants mounted on mossy slabs of driftwood or in decorative ceramic pots, accented with tiny handmade ladybugs, and a selection of brushes, cutters, a jar of clay tinted various colours, and a mat for working on. Here is where some of the magic is made.

Chaba grew up in Chaiprakarn, a small town in northern Thailand, in a house full of plants, so it was almost inevitable that she would have the same love of growing flowers as her mother has. She says, “the only thing my mother can’t grow well is orchids. One time I went into a shop to buy flowers for her, and the orchids were gorgeous. I looked more closely and realized they were synthetic, but so lifelike!” She was instantly smitten. Eventually, she had purchased so many flowers from the shop and asked over and over to be taught how to do them, that the shop owner agreed to teach her. This was some 15 years ago, and her love of creating the flowers has continued.

When she first learned to make flowers, Chaba was living in Louisiana, where she opened a flower shop in 2012, but returned to Thailand every year for visits with her family and to buy supplies for her flowers. During her visit home in 2017, she was at a market buying supplies and met a man from Nova Scotia, Mark Conrad. She says simply, “I knew he was the one.”

The handmade clay is put through a pasta roller to give it even thickness, then Chaba cuts out the various pieces needed.

She took a month to close her business and life in Louisiana and then Mark brought her to Nova Scotia, they got married and she settled into her life here. Her new husband told her that she had no need to work if she didn’t want to, but she felt immediately at home here, and felt the need to create flowers again.

The first flower she made, Chaba gave to her dear friend Nancy for her birthday, who told her more people needed to see her creations and that opening a shop here would be a great idea. Chaba didn’t want that much work, but she did want to create flowers and meet other artists, so she joined the Peggy’s Cove Area Festival of the Arts, as well as another artisan group in the area, the Red Roof Artists. Encouraged by local artists including Paula Fredericks and Jerry Walsh, she took part in a show during the Festival in July, and people were “so amazed and excited and supportive.”

Of her art, Chaba says shyly, “Some people immediately love what I do, others don’t at first understand the effort to create this work of art.” When she first started making the native Nova Scotian lady slippers, she was doing a craft show where a woman saw her work and was angry because she thought these were real plants that Chaba had dug up. When the customer realized they were hand crafted, she went from concerned to positive immediately. Chaba considers it high praise when people cannot tell on first glance whether her flowers are real plants or not.

There’s a hand-cranked pasta roller mounted on the counter in the kitchen, and this is where Chaba’s creations begin. Her raw clay is a mixture of a special Japanese clay and a Thai clay that she blends herself, then combines with oil paint to make the base colour for whichever pieces she is constructing. “Everything on the plant is made of clay, with the exception of adhesive, paint, and thin wires that support the larger pieces,” she says. The flowers and leaves are not fired but left to air dry. She rolls the clay out to an even thickness, then uses metal tools that she made herself to cut out multiple leaves, buds, and flower.

“Today, I’ll make leaves all day; tomorrow, it will be petals,” she says. From start to finish, it takes about two days to create a flower, but she makes a whole bunch at once, and they air dry for two to three hours before she paints and embosses design details on them.

From start to finish, the making of a flower/plant can take several days.

Although she makes other flowers including sunflowers, lilies, tulips and peonies, Chaba’s favourites are the lady slipper orchids, which have always fascinated her and have so much variation in their colours and patterns. For the non-orchid enthusiast, there are different genera, many species and seemingly infinite varieties out there. Chaba doesn’t claim to know all of those, but she has learned about the Cypripedium varieties native to Nova Scotia, including the pink, white and yellow types, and she has created many of those for admirers. The Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium genera are exotics, some of which grow in Thailand but that don’t grow here except in cultivation, and they include amazing colour combinations.

The biggest challenge in making her orchid flowers is making the little pocket, or slipper, that is a key factor of all the lady slipper orchids, but she has mastered the technique of making and painting the pocket now and is pleased with the results.

Once the flowers are made, the next fun step is to decide how to display them. Chaba says, “The base can greatly enhance the character of the arrangement, and I take great care in matching the base with each arrangement.” She uses decorative ceramic or wooden pots, pots, driftwood, and handmade wooden frames to mount her flowers, but says her personal preference is to mount the orchids on driftwood, “because that is how they grow in the forests of my country, and how I have seen them.” She adds, “I used to watch my grandfather growing orchids by attaching them to driftwood and hanging them up under the trees in his yard. So I want my arrangements to look realistic.” Additionally, each piece of driftwood is completely unique, so each arrangement is unique, like a snowflake.

Chaba doesn’t wish to have a shop, but she attends several shows a year, and now has her work in several stores throughout Nova Scotia: at Made in the Maritimes, where I first stopped dead in my tracks when I saw them, at Comfort and Joy in Lunenburg, and at Coconut Creek in Dartmouth. She also has a Facebook page at facebook.com/chabaconrad, where people can see her flowers, her animal paintings and also the pearl and leather jewellery she creates with freshwater pearls from
her homeland.

As we stand in her living room surrounded by so much colour and joy, Chaba says, “I keep trying to improve with every flower I make—I love what I do so much, I never feel like I’m working. I consider myself very lucky to be able to create, and give my husband big thanks for his love and support.

“You have to love what you do, because it definitely shows in your creation.”