English: Large free style Jiyūka (自由花) Installation with birch, by 45th Generation Headmaster Ikenobo Sen’ei (華道家元 四十五世　池坊専永), at the 2018 Ikenobō Autumn Tanabata Exhibition, Takashimaya Kyoto. He describes his work:

Process

Fall leaves are beautiful. A form without decoration is beautiful. Trees without leaves are also beautiful. Leaves are freed from a tree, and a tree is freed of its leaves. Each is seen anew. The human heart finds beauty here. Even within a withered bloom the aesthetic of Ikenobo finds the beauty of a flower. Beautiful leaves are experienced as being just as beautiful as flowers. The „Senno Kuden“ teaches that as we face withered branches and experience the elegance of plants we can attain enlightenment. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) quoted from the „Senno Kuden“.

Beauty resides in all forms that bring out the life of plants.

The path of arranging flowers is not in completed arrangements but rather in the process of arranging. Trees tinted by the colours of their fallen leaves and a glimpse of the workings of life move the human heart. In the next moment this scene becomes the arrangement.

In this work I have tried to express the process of an arrangement coming into being.