Hello all,
On the second of July, Lucy and I ran a workshop with our group with the theme from the proposed book 5 - 'That which cannot be expressed by Plants'. We gave a great deal of thought to this theme because we have not as yet received any guidelines from headquarters. We looked through past Sogetsu magazines that have exhibition pieces which are made by man-made materials only and came up with our own take on the theme. That is, we were to use metal, plastic, glass, paper, fabric and even wood that has gone through some kind of manufacturing process. We did not eliminate all organic materials such as paper, fabric, wool or cotton yarn etc. We only eliminated all plant materials whether they be fresh or dry. We will, of course, rethink all of the above if headquarters advises us differently.

Lucy and I enjoyed this exercise so much that we had difficulty stopping at just one or two examples.  As a consequence we went a little overboard. Lucy made the eight pieces below.

Sheets of aluminium with copper coloured cardboard

Cardboard

Particle board and cardboard with wire legs

Steel reinforcements and plastic strips

Aluminium and glass

Glass with metal triangles, topped with crushed glass

Paper

Wire, paper and Christmas bauble in metal container

The seven pieces below were made by me.

Plastic and cords, aluminium strip and wooden board

Aluminium and copper

Plastic on chrome base and crushed glass

Partly rusted steel, wooden balls

Wooden balls sprayed silver

Plastic tube, metal ring and glass filled with crushed
glass

3 different types of plastic

The above piece used in a wall arrangement with carex leaves
and green Goddess lilies

Some very good work was produced by our members and I recommend that you visit sogetsuikabanavic.weebly.com for the photographs. We have Christopher James to thank for all the photographs, including the editing of mine and Lucy's.


Bye for now,
Emily