EMILY IN TOKYO

Thursday 2 July 2015

Hello all,

Privetstvuyu moih russkih chitatelei! (I welcome all my Russian readers). When I checked the stats of my blog recently, I discovered, to my delight, that there are quite a few readers from Russia and I wanted to acknowledge them but did not know how. At a recent NGV luncheon I found myself seated at a table with a lovely Russian family, who, very kindly, wrote the above phrase for me. Thank you Svetlana, Kate and Sacha.

And now to Ikebana. I came across an agave plant in an industrial site and went and asked if I could cut some. Barry, the owner referred to it as a weed and, not only gave me permission to cut as much as I wanted, but brought out a knife and cut it for me. Agave is one of my favourite materials and I'm very grateful to Barry so the next two arrangements I dedicate to him.

There has been a lot of ikebana since my last post. In our previous class I had set the theme for the advanced students 'What cannot be expressed by nature' i.e. Using only man-made materials. This is one of the exercises that will be in the new text book and provided an interesting challenge. I was very pleased with the quality of work by all the students.

Helen Novic

Janette Fonda

Bredenia Raquel

Vicky Kalokathis

Lucy Papas was quite prolific and made the three structures above.

This is one of mine

For Elizabeth's class, our theme was 'Mass, Line and Colour' and I made the two arrangements below.

We also had our chapter meeting and workshop last Saturday, which was run by Christopher James. The theme was 'Collaborative exercise. Table top size structure then to connect with two or more members to create a larger work.'

Lucy and I worked together. Continuing with my experimentation with bamboo, I used it again in this exercise. Lucy used dowels and connected them with small dowels to create a very impressive structure, which she calls 'New York skyline'. Please visit the Victorian Chapter website for more photographs.