Tag: grace

Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers? by Camille Henrot

The exhibition of Paris based artist Camille Henrot is like a premonition of fresh spring with profound intrinsic meaning inside. Her practice of ikebana is linked to the idea of ‘art as autotransformation’. Camille Henrot perpetuates, in her own way, the Japanese art of the bouquet, where the arrangement of flowers is supposed to reflect the state of mind of the person who creates it. Just as values are embodied in natural things, supposedly innocuous flowers take on the aura of powerful and destructive weapons in the hands of the artist.

“My initial attraction to ikebana has to do with how it corresponds to the idea of an object meant to appease a troubled soul. Unlike ‘western’ art, which seeks to ward off the anguish of death through the creation of imperishable works, ikebana sets out (to console us through the intervention of elements. Through this project, I also had an ambition to attack in some small way the mental hierarchy specific to western culture that always has a tendency to idealise the arts of discourse and to undervalue the everyday arts such as flower arranging. Here, one is reminded of one of the major themes of Zen anti-rationalism, neatly summed up in the following adage: “Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.”"