AOTEAROA: LAND OF THE LONG WHITE CLOUD

This week Roadside Ikebana comes to you from Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. 

Laurie and I arrived on a windy and rather cool, late afternoon for a three week visit during which I will give a series of ikebana workshops in the cities of Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch. 

I was pleased on the morning of the first workshop, with members of the Wellington Branch of Sogetsu Teachers Association, to wake to the view above across the Wellington harbour.

    

The workshop was held in a lovely bright, modern hall that allowed plenty of room for the participants. The first of three workshops for the day was on construction techniques for using dowels and wiring to fix materials.

The blurry image above is a detail from a larger photo showing a small sculpture made from cypress that had been dowelled and placed on a ceramic box.

Here I am showing that the same small sculpture can be used in a variety of ways according to the imagination of the ikebanist.

Next, I asked each of the participants to practise wiring, using a technique that is very firm and prevents the branches from sliding on each other.

This method is perfect for securing the smaller branchlets of materials such as this birch, enabling the creation of freestanding, 'no kenzan' arrangements like the demonstration example above. This was the subject of the second workshop for the day.

The third workshop for the day was making an arrangement 'with leaves only' or 'repeating shapes' in an arrangement. The photo above is my demonstration work for the latter exercise, using three aspidistra leaves and a single nerine flower. Unfortunately, I was not able to also take photos of the participants work.

Greetings from Christopher

10th May 2015