Louesa Roebuck’s Punk Ikebana
Join us on tour
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.
Photo: Sean Jerd
Louesa Roebuck, author of two critically acclaimed books - Foraged Flora (Ten Speed Press, 2016) and Punk Ikebana (Cameron Books, 2022) - is a printmaker, painter, and floral artist.
After moving to California from Ohio in 1998, Louesa worked at the influential Chez Panisse, which profoundly shaped the direction of her career. Louesa continued her education of California culture and beauty working closely with the clothing and textile designer Erica Tanov, then went on to open August, a seminal and before its time fashion, art, and community hub. August was an early proponent of the intersection of luxury apparel and environmentally and socially responsible textile practices. After losing her business during the worldwide economic crash of 2008, Louesa returned to her lifelong love of foraged and gleaned floral work.
Louesa was the featured speaker at San Francisco’s de Young Fine Arts Museum’s Bouquets to Art 2023, and has spoken and led flora workshops at Flowers Vineyards and Winery, Robinson Gardens, among others. Louesa has created floral installations from foraged and gleaned materials for high-end clients such as Vivienne Westwood, John Baldessari, Todd Selby, Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Rintaro, SHED Healdsburg, MAK center for art and architecture with LACMA, GOOP, Carolyn Murphy, Blackman Cruz, Vogue and House Beautiful. Louesa has also collaborated with Fatima Robinson, Donna Langley, Anna Getty, James Newton Howard, Dan Barber, Adam and Kate Blackman, and the Ganna Walks Lotusland Botanical Gardens.
Herfloral and monotype work has been featured in a number of national and international magazines and media, including Vogue, GOOP, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine, Cabana, Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, C Magazine, Edible Selby, Remodelista, Frederic Magazine, Gardenista, Bare Journal, Sunset, Martha Stewart Living, Beekman Almanac, and across the Amber Interiors social media platforms.
Louesa liveswith her partner Curtis and their three dogsoutside of Ojai, and considers all of California her home.
“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.”