7 minute read
Paper, silk, wax and wire: made flowers across cultures
The impulse to make a flower out of something that isn't a flower is old, widespread, and almost always religious in origin.
Read itTraditions
Made flowers, across cultures and centuries
The impulse to make a flower that outlasts a flower isn't modern and it isn't Western. It appears on its own in Mexican paper craft, Japanese silk work, Victorian wax modelling and Chinese funerary offerings, and usually in a religious or commemorative setting.
In Sri Lanka the flower traditions that matter are devotional rather than decorative, and that's worth knowing before you assume a made flower means the same thing here as it does in a European craft history.
What follows is a survey rather than a family tree. This studio didn't descend from any of it. The technique here is its own, worked out at a bench, and all it shares with these traditions is the impulse: people have wanted to keep a flower for a very long time, and almost always for the same reason.
In this section
7 minute read
Flowers in Sri Lankan life
There's araliya at the temple, lotus at the shrine, and a calendar of offering that has nothing to do with decoration.
Read it6 minute read
Why people preserve flowers at all
Pressing, drying, wax, resin and glycerine are five methods with one motive behind them, and a long history of disappointment.
Read itElsewhere in the guide
Technique
There are three moves: the loop, the bind and the wrap. Here's what the hands are doing, and why each step is done the way it is.
Materials
Wire remembers, fibre catches light, and the cheapest component in the room decides almost everything about the finished piece.
Form and symmetry
Five-fold symmetry, the vesica, and how to read a real flower well enough to build one that isn't a cartoon of it.
Conservation
Light, humidity, oxidation and handling. We cover which of them matter, which are myths, and what conservators do about each.