"Driftwood and Beyond"

Central Southland Floral Art Club

It’s always good for us, as floral designers, to explore other art forms. There’s always fresh skills and techniques to learn, new equipment to explore and concepts that could be adapted for floral art. Adding to our ‘skills bank’ is a very important part of the design process and progression for us as designers. So it was an absolute treat to have two local artists join us for our July meeting to share their artform and knowledge with us.

Thornbury artist RODERICK HALL provided club members and community visitors with an excellent insight into his artform, driftwood sculptures. He’s well-known in Southern circles for creating large-scale animal sculptures and he spoke about the techniques and processes needed to create these. Inspired by his talk, and under Rodericks’s expert guidance, we spent time creating some driftwood creations of our own … driftwood vessels, a vase form and driftwood sculptures. Our venue resembled a Workshop with nail guns, compressors, drill presses, portable work benches, drills and multiple glue guns all coming in for the occasion. The finished pieces are stand-alone works of art, or they could be a starting point for plant material and embellishments to be added.

Our second visiting artist was photographer MEL SYMON who talked us through how to take better photos of our work using both SLR cameras and phones. She talked about backgrounds, composition, showed us how to use reflector sheets to highlight areas in and around a design and encouraged us to explore more features on our phones to improve the quality of photos.

An inspiring and informative evening!