WORKSHOP IN WELLINGTON

On Monday last we took a ferry across the strait from the north to the south island of New Zealand.

 

These rocks were on the (port) left-side of the entrance to Wellington harbour. It was a relatively smooth crossing in spite of the very cold wind that kept me inside for most of the journey.

The last part of the journey through Queen Charlotte Sound / Totaranui, was like the proverbial 'mill pond'.

This is the harbour of Picton, in the evening, where we stayed  the night before driving to Greymouth on the west coast.

I had previously heard about the driftwood to be seen on the beaches of this coast and was not disappointed. 

Except that there was no way of getting any of it back home to Torquay. This timber has fallen into the streams and rivers in the Southern Alps from where it is washed down to the sea and then back onto the beaches by the fierce westerly winds and tides.

While in Wellington last weekend I conducted two workshops for the Sogetsu Branch there. The first workshop was to make the curriculum exercise, Variation Number eight; that is, creating a single ikebana using two vessels. In this case a suiban (shallow) and a nageire (tall) vessel. It is a good way to review techniques for the two basic forms taught in the Sogetsu school.

This photo was taken as I was conducting the critique in the afternoon session. In this session the first part of the exercise was to make an ikebana on the Sogetsu curriculum theme of 'Disassembling and re-arranging'. That means finding a material and cutting it into its component elements. For example: stems, leaves, flowers, fruit, etc. Then the ikebanist has to make a completely new art work with these discrete elements. 

I added an extra element to the exercise of adding some text to the work.

Thinking about the exercise the day before it occurred to me that I should treat the text in the same manner. Disassembling and re-arranging. So I cut out single letters in a variety of fonts and colours from newspapers, which I made into the mass on the top left. I then created a sentence which issued from the mass. You may recognise a quote from a John Denver song if you can read the words.

The plant material is the flower stem, the fruit and a rosette of leaves from a Pineapple lily Eucomis.

At the end of the day a visitor kindly took this photo of the fourteen participants (and me).

Greetings from Christopher
1st April 2023