Found Ikebana

   The series is my personal Memento mori and it is about how our creative imagination helps us to accept death that always exists within life.
 
   Autumn leaves and algae on the river created beautiful compositions, natural ikebana, whose lives are quite short. The water flow and the wind constantly change them, demonstrating the acceptance of the natural course of life, a part of which is the inevitable death.
 
   Literally translated, ikebana is the "second life of cut flowers" and is based on the principle of elegant simplicity, which is achieved by discovering the natural beauty of the material, and mirrors the balance and emptiness. We tend to turn away from the "ugly" and look towards the "ideal", which does not exist in nature, just as there is no permanent, finished... We cannot discard any moment from experience, even if it is not perfect.  However, we can be sure that over time everything will change. Where there is an end, there will always be a beginning.  Where there is death, there will always be life.
 
   At the beginning of war in Ukraine the energy of death dragged me into its abyss. Psychologists recommended to draw lines to separate life and death. That's how "Found Ikebana" series was born as images of dead leaves on live water. It turned out that human imagination is more powerful, death retreated.

 

  Our imagination protects us when it gives us a hope for going on, but this is how life is affirmed. Our purposes, meanings of lives, dreams - these illusions as tools of instinct of self-preservation, help us accept death to continue affirming life and push us to live our lives.

 

  Cicero says that contem­plation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually comes down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.