What are these Digital Ikebanas?
The series is inspired by the ancient aesthetic art of Japanese Ikebana floral arrangement.
However, my Ikebana exist only as prints and digital images, considering
that they are composed out of a wide variety of plant images taken from
online databases of university biology departments all over the world.
They have been repurposed to investigate the relationship between artifice and nature.
The spectrum of compositional possibilities seems endless. What criteria did you follow when making the arrangements?
Very true, and this means creating the combinations is a lengthy process.
My paradigm is to create an equilibrium of linear construction in order
to create a form of beauty that cannot be found in nature, using varied
plant material, such as flowers, branches, leaves, grasses, moss, fruit,
wilted leaves, seed pods and buds.
The essence of Ikebana is beauty resulting from the arrangement of
formal combinations, natural shapes, graceful lines, and the meaning
underlying the ultimate form of the layout.
Additionally, I take into account asymmetrical form and the use of empty
space as an essential feature of the composition, which are
characteristic of Ikebana.
Your work is very much based on digital manipulation. What new territories has this opened up to your artistic endeavours?
I was inspired by techniques of modern re-photography, of layering
digital media and by aspects of appropriation - considering the basic
act of making art as a borrowing of images or concepts from the
surrounding world, and re-interpreting them as art. This is an artistic
practice that incorporates much of the methods of Postmodernism.
Found objects, contemporary images, and images from the past have all
been appropriated by artists and used in their work. However, the
appropriation of digital images in art is a phenomenon new to the
twentieth century. I take a keen interest in this idea, while also
embracing the use of contemporary technologies such as the Internet.
Every new advance in information technology facilitates the creation of
new works or ideas, thus paving the way for a broad potential of
artistic practices. Digital technology makes it possible to manipulate
images as never before, and allows me to invent not only new forms of
“reproduction” but also of “production”.
The result - a digital image - is not just the artefact of a new way of
producing images, but a radically new image, and this may force art to
re-conceptualize the very notion of image. In many ways, digital arts
investigate the relationship between the real and the virtual.
Limited edition, numbered and signed.