It is now mushroom season in Spain and our local Farmers’ Market is filled with new and interesting varieties. The shapes and colours were so beautiful I couldn’t resist buying a couple of punnets for ikebana.
My youngest daughter decided that she also wanted to create an arrangement with the mushrooms. Her convincing argument was that she had to do a Natural Science project on the Fungi Kingdom, and she could use the picture of her finished arrangement in her project.
She chose a small ceramic vase that reminded her of a mushroom. Instead of a standard fixation technique, she used shaker bottle wire whisks to support her material.
She selected her mushrooms for their shape, texture, and colour, and inserted them between the wires of the whisks. To create a focal point, she placed the orange mushrooms close together and, for interest and depth, she added a single orange mushroom inside one of the wire whisks.
Once the arrangement was complete, we moved it to take photographs. As my daughter walked with the arrangement it swayed from side to side. As it slowly came to a standstill she exclaimed “It looks just like Ilse’s!” (referring to Ilse Beunen's Rocking Ikebana installation in Finland).