SCULPTURAL FORMS USING WOOD

This Saturday morning had the best of autumn weather, bright sunshine and no wind. It was a cool nine degrees Celsius at 8.00 am, but had warmed somewhat when we had a walk on the beach after a late breakfast. The tide was especially low, so we walked out onto the exposed reef. This way we can look at the waves about 80 metres from the shore without getting our feet wet! We also were able to look into some small rock pools. 

 

This one had a large collection of mostly broken shells with a variety of colour and form.

In the next pool I came across I was delighted to see a rather large sea urchin with characteristic red spines.

The pale purple stripes are masses of tiny pedicellaria it uses to move and to transfer food to its "mouth"

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On Thursday at class in Geelong I had set the students some homework. They were given 20 sets of disposable chopsticks,(hashi in Japanese), with which they were to make a small, irregular, sculptural form by wiring them together. If they wished they could paint the sculpture or leave it in a raw state. At the class, their exercise was to then use the small sculptures as a design element in their freestyle ikebana.

Helen Q had painted her sculpture lime green, (chartreuse, I was advised). Helen had set some variegated Aloe leaves strongly reaching to the left rear from a black suiban. She placed her sculpture within the suiban but spilling forward to the right front.

Christine painted her sculpture a bright blue to pick up the blue tips on the Bromeliad flower, from her garden. At the front is a small mass of blue Salvia flowers.

  

Maureen chose to leave her sculpture unpainted and found that it went well with a bleached branch of Mitsumata, Edgeworthia chrysantha. Some Nandina berries provide a contrasting focal point and the fine green line with leaves in the space on the left side, balances the sculptural mass on the right.

Helen M chose a black vase for her sculpture which she contrasted with some Dutch iris, Iris x hollandica and yellow Chrysanthemum.

Tess also painted her sculpture black and used it with contrasting black and white bottle-shaped vases. Her fresh material of Geranium was placed on the opposite side of the ikebana.

Jo painted her sculpture a rich yellow and set it to the left side of her brown-glazed vase. A single flower of Banksia ericifolia is supported within the structure, which is balanced by the green line of the Banksia stem on the right side.

Jo also made a second ikebana using the twig structure that she had made in the previous week. Here its lightness is balanced by the mass of a single Hydrangea.

Ellie made this ikebana using her pale-green painted sculpture. Her fresh material was green Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus carota, and Nandina domestica (dwarf form).

In a second ikebana Ellie created this work in a suiban. In this instance the sculpture is both a design element and the support structure for the fresh material, pink Chrysanthemums.

She used hashi that had not been separated into two parts. With the tension between the two parts of the still joined hashi they were enabled to grip other unseparated hashi. I found it an interesting and novel idea.

My own ikebana this week is a much larger sculptural structure. It was made for the exhibition "A moment in time", held in the 

All Nations Foyer at the Box Hill Town Hall, organised and curated by Emily Karanikolopoulos. The venue had three tall and narrow glass display cases, one of which I was to use. This protected environment enabled me to use a special ceramic ikebana vessel by Nakamura Yutaka that has fairly thin walls. 

Of necessity, the structure had to be a vertical form and I have used birchwood branches, dowelled together. To emphasise the form I placed some of the thicker pieces high in the structure in such a way that they are suspended above the space beneath them. The contrasting material is dwarf Nandina domestica and three stems of Coastal Sword Sedge, Lepidosperma gladiatum.

Greetings from Christopher

21st May 2022