The Way of Flowers

The Way of Flowers - An exhibition about photography and flower arrangements, exploring nature, harmony and perception through Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging.

The project explores how we see beauty and perceive images through the use of compositional rules, and our relationship with the environment, through the methods and structures of Ikebana - Japanese flower arrangements.

Ikebana, often used as a way of getting closer to nature, can be seen as visualisation of the unified bond between man and nature. Dating back over 550 years, flower arrangements were first offered on the Buddhist altar and has over the years moved away from only having a religious purpose to be seen as an art form in its own right, at first only for wealthy townsmen, to later becoming popular for anyone to practice.

Governed by strict rules on how long each flower, stem or branch used in an arrangement should be, at which angle it should be presented and the symbolic meaning of what type of flower you include, Ikebana is a way of bringing nature in and expressing emotion through the composition and arrangement of it.

I started researching Ikebana in 2016, and have over the past two years conducted research in the UK and Japan, and conducted interviews at Ikenobo Hq, the oldest school of Ikebana in Japan, where Ikebana originates from. I started taking lessons to better understand the art form, and photographed every arrangements that I made whilst trying to achieve a more and more perfect and beautiful arrangement. Researching archival illustrations and a range of learning material, I was fascinated by the similarity in compositions taught for visual art, such as photography, and the many ways ‘improving’ nature was described. Techniques such as cutting and bending branches, to somehow make it more beautiful, more natural, is usually showed in photographs demonstrating the techniques to beginners, and this is something I wanted to reflect on in my work.

The title of the exhibition, The Way of Flowers, is inspired by the English translation of the Japanese word Kado, suggesting that flowers have their own path, or way. Through my work, I explore the language of images and how we construct and perceive beauty. It questions our relationship with nature, in a time when the majority of the population in countries such as Japan lives in cities and urban areas, removed from the rural and natural environment.

I am always interested in images, language and interpretation of information. In the Way of Flowers I look at the line diagrams used to instruct and create beautiful flower arrangement and how we translate information, from diagram to image, creating connections between the composition of images and of Ikebana flower arrangements.

The exhibition The Way of Flowers shows mainly photographs, including a series of images of the photographer’s own flower arrangements, diagrams, text, and a cityscape printed in a format vaguely resembling a hanging scroll in a tokonoma. One frame contains just a brief line of text of feedback on a flower arrangement from a professor at Ikenobo HQ, replacing what could have been an actual photograph of a flower arrangement, with a description and correction instead.