Louesa Roebuck’s Punk Ikebana - Available For PreOrder
“In the capable hands and through the honest, piercing, and loving eyes of flora-adorer Louesa Roebuck, the very contradictory contours of our humanity are offered to us in word, deed, and mercurial photography by Ian Hughes in Punk Ikebana, Louesa’s newest, tenderest offering to the world.”
“Every creative practice has its forms and structures, its rules. Ikebana is no different. But Louesa doesn’t make flower arrangements any more than Thelonious Monk simply played songs. Instead, she collects a bunch of stems and leaves and tendrils and fruits and brambles and seedpods and blossoms, and she uses them to create an exhilaration of beauty, a wonder of stilled time.”
“Punk Ikebana, it’s life with death, friend. It’s about a place and a time. A moment, but also the where of it all. How it all fits together. Where does nature end? Elevations. Levels to it. The horror of it all. Complete splendor. The dark. You ever meet someone who can just touch something, move things, arrange, make it right? It’s rare, and you hold it in your hands.”
Photo: Sean Jerd
Louesa Roebuck is a printmaker, painter, floral artist, and author of Foraged Flora. After studying printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, she moved to California in 1997. Soon after, she began working at the internationally famed Chez Panisse and eventually opened her own community hub, August, which served as an intersection of luxury apparel, environmentally and socially responsible textile practices, art curation, and too many "happenings".
Roebuck has created floral installations for Vivienne Westwood, John Baldessari, Todd Selby, Michael Pollan, Michelle Obama, Alice Waters, Izakaya Rintaro, abc Carpet & Home, Healdsburg SHED (alongside Dan Barber), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, GOOP, Vogue, and Nowness.
Her floral and monotype work have been featured in a number of national and international magazines and media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, Cabana, Architectural Digest, C Magazine, Edible Selby, Remodelista, Bare Journal, Carolyn Murphy for Vogue, Sunset, Martha Stewart Living, Beekman 1802 Almanac, and more. Roebuck's monotypes have been featured in Architectural Digest and C Magazine.
Roebuck considers all of California her home and resides in Ojai.
louesaroebuck.com
@louesaroebuck
Ian Hughes is a British-born photographer, art director, and craftsman. He lives in Ojai, California. ianhughes.com
Obi Kaufmann is an American naturalist, writer, poet, and illustrator. He is the author of The California Field Atlas, an illustrated guide to the state's ecology and geography, which was on the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list and won a gold medal at the California Book Awards, as well as the NCIBA Book of the Year award. Kaufmann is an avid environmentalist, winning the 2019 Mark Dubois River Protection Award for his efforts, and is on the Board of Directors of the California Wilderness Coalition. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Cameron Books is a boutique publishing company in Petaluma, CA and a division of Abrams.
Join us on tour
November 4
Little Saint (Healdsburg)
November 5
Copperfield's (Marin)
November 10
Blackman Cruz (LA)
Stay Tuned for December Events
In its gloriously luxe pages, Punk Ikebana deconstructs our modern perceptions of floral design. Louesa carefully weaves a new narrative, foraging and gleaning flora from California's always-evolving landscapes. Her arrangements and installations unite the cultural wisdom and elegance of the Japanese perspective with California’s exhilarating freedom from convention. Aligning her deep commitment to the environment with her love of foraging, gleaning, and sourcing locally, Louesa offers this very simple mantra: if you only forage, glean, or source local and micro-seasonal flora, you’ll have a perfectly symbiotic and harmonious practice, one that is intrinsically whole and abundant, full of more yeses than nos.
Louesa will demonstrate a foraged installation and follow with an audience Q & A and signing.