Bamboo sculpture competition 2016

There is another bamboo sculpture contest being organised by the Bamboo Society of Australia.  The entries will displayed and judged at the Brisbane International Garden Show in October 2016.

Three prize categories are on offer. First prize is $3,000. Entry fee for non-members is $100. Alternatively, you could take out a yearly e-membership for $20, enter the competition for $75, and have access to years of current and back-issues of the Bamboo Bulletin. The Bamboo Bulletin offers stacks of information about identifying, growing, maintaining, and using bamboo.

The Bamboo Society of Australia will have a booth at the Garden Show. This is a fine opportunity to quiz some experts about growing bamboo.

See you there!

 

Bamboo on the Internet for January, 2015

A light month of things bamboo on the internet that got my attention, but here goes:

• Ninja firefighters? Firefighters on a stick? Only in Japan: firefighters in Tokyo displaying their prowess on top of 6 metre bamboo poles.

• If you needed another reason to get a bamboo bicycle, this might be it: A bamboo bike that can recharge your mobile devices. It can run your on-board navigation system, and charge your smartphone, and one other device. Oh, they also come with a bluetooth option.

• Or how about bamboo grips for cameras? They are available for a range of popular digital cameras. Why? “improved ergonomics, increased protection, and a unique look.”

• Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art is an exhibition exploring the innovative shape bamboo art has taken since the mid-20th century. The exhibition is on in Florida until April 25 (2015), if you happen to be near by.

• Taiwanese newspaper, The China Post, posted an article about bamboo artist Wang Wen-Chih and his most recent Woodford Folk Festival project. The 2013-14 installation at Woodford, Woven Sky, received such a positive response that he returned this year with some childhood friends from his hometown in Taiwan to construct Woven Cloud. He was assisted by 40 local volunteers. Cave Urban have some great images posted.

Bamboo on the Internet for October, 2014 – my picks

• From Zenbox Design: A lightweight bamboo-clad mini camper. Towed by a Mini Minor. With a skylight to see the stars at night. More images at Zenbox. The dog looks happy.

• Bamboo yarn got a mention here recently. I hadn’t thought of it before, but bamboo yarn is not only soft and silky, it’s vegan too! The PETA blog assures us that no cruelty is committed by using bamboo yarn.

• The Nagaland Bamboo Development Agency constructed a bamboo bird watching tower near Doyang as part of a bamboo promotion campaign.

• Green Building Elements this month featured a lightweight greenhouse built from plastic drink bottles and bamboo – architect designed, no less. This one is now in operation on a farm near Hanoi.

• A virtual bamboo forest even noisier than the bamboo forest at Damyang.

• More awesome bamboo architecture in Vietnam. This 750-seat hotel restaurant in Son La uses a local bamboo called Luong that grows to 8 metres high.

96 bamboo column units composed of 4 bamboos together induce the vertical expression of the bamboo structure like bamboo forest.

The bamboo was treated in a traditional method by soaking in it mud and then smoking it. I highly recommend a viewing of the other images on the Arch Daily website.

Bamboo on the Internet for September, 2014 – my picks

• With bamboo shoot season getting closer in the southern hemisphere, here is a timely reminder to seek out new bamboo shoot recipes. The original caption tells us that this dish hails from the north eastern states of India. The recipe for this bamboo shoot stir is here.

• Who could resist a black burger? Images of the Japanese Burger King wonders were all over the Internet this month. Black buns, black cheese, black ketchup. Its here because the black buns are bamboo charcoal bread.

• Bamboo bicycles are becoming more popular. I haven’t posted any here before because of their apparent ubiquity, but the DIY version looks really interesting.

• This was one of the bamboo sculptures at the Brisbane Festival this year: Brisbane Airport Light Garden, a collaboration between Tony Assness and Cave Urban. Cave Urban are now calling for expressions of interest to volunteer for the 2014/2015 Woodford Folk Festival project, “Woven Cloud”. Details, and more stunning images, are on their website. Last years project, a bamboo tunnel, was featured here.

• BOO! is a show by French trapeze artists, CirkVOSTA using a 15 metre high mobile bamboo structure. Click here for a short but mesmerizing YouTube clip of a practice session. Or watch the longer 5 minute vid of the show. Read more here.

• Popularity can be problematic. In Burma’s northern Shan State, the forests are disappearing. Villagers seek out bamboo shoots to smoke-dry and sell to Chinese traders.  The pressures on the environment are two-fold: the foragers are taking potentially unsustainable numbers of bamboo shoots and, huge amounts of timber are needed to feed the smokehouse fires. Full story and video clip here.

• Bamboo memory foam pillows. They’re new to me. The claims are marvellous: life span of 10 years; dust mite resistant; hypoallergenic; anti-microbial; and, machine washable.

The inaugural Bamboo Sculpture Competition

The weekend of 6-7 September, 2014, saw the Bamboo Society of Australia (BSA) put on its first Bamboo Sculpture competition. The competition was held in conjunction with the Living Community Festival at the Mullumbimby Community Gardens (7 Sept.). The weekend was, in a nutshell, fantastic.

The comp attracted a dozen entries, each one distinctive, and diverse, in its own way. The judges must have struggled. First prize and the People’s Choice Award went to the two entries by the same creators. There are lots of images of the weekend on the BSA Facebook page.

The event was made more fascinating for me because I was on site for the two days leading up to the exhibition. Most of the entries were so large that they were (re)constructed on site. Just by hanging about and lending a hand here and there, I picked up some useful tips on working with bamboo. On the Sunday there were also impromptu demonstrations around the BSA bamboo yurt. Pictured above is Munir from Giant Grass. Munir travelled from Melbourne to create the sculpture behind him. Here, he is showing a fascinated crowd how to bend bamboo using heat, one of the processes he used to make the sculpture of bamboo funnels.

Also present was Victor Cusack. Victor is well-known in Australia as probably our most prolific writer on Bamboo. He was on hand to promote the beautiful new edition of his book, Bamboo World.

It was something of a revelation for me to meet a group of people who are so passionate about bamboo and so generous with their knowledge. Really, all they talked about, with very few exceptions, was bamboo, in its innumerable manifestations – growing, collecting, constructing with, creating with… Future events are planned. Keep an eye on the BSA website.

Bamboo on the Internet for July, 2014 – my picks

Bamboo on the Internet for July (and some of June):

• This deserves to come first. A wonderfully simple and effective idea: Bamboo shinguards for soccer players. Time is running out for your opportunity to invest in the project on Kickstarter (18 August).

• Bamboo fish being chased by a life-sized orca: Looks like we missed a great community event on Guernsey this month. I always think of the delightful book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, when someone mentions Guernsey.

Bamboo in modern Japanese architecture. Click on the image for more.

• Inspired by tepees? This triangular modular hotel made with bamboo is getting lots of attention. The design is a flexible system allowing the bamboo structure to be expanded horizontally and vertically, they say. It’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t feel every movement within the building.

• Another take on expand-as-needed architecture is inspired by bamboo scaffolding.

Just add more floors as required, using waste from other offices. “Each floor is made from an interlaced network of tube framing, with construction building materials being sourced from waste material produced by the offices, namely paper and plastics.”

• One for the painters: here is a review of a bamboo brush box. It gets a 4.8 (out of 5) star rating on Amazon.

• A new hospital in India is clad with bamboo. The bamboo “acts as a natural insulator and allows the hospital to do away with air conditioning in common areas such as lobbies and reception. This resulted in saving electricity and reducing maintenance cost.” It looks good too.

• Here is a short video clip about the construction of a traditional Hong Kong bamboo installation. The ‘flower plaque’ is part of the Smithsonian Institutes 2014 Folklife Festival. Learn more about flower plaques here and here.

• Precision computerised joinery and high-tech adhesives are all that hold these bamboo chairs together. There’s also some nesting tables of a similar construction.

• In case you missed the YouTube vids of the awesome rocket festival in Northern Thailand here is a link. Not for the faint hearted.

• Colossal has published photos of Wang Wen-Chih’s finished bamboo entry tunnel (mentioned here back in October) at the Woodford Folk Festival site.

Bamboo on the Internet for June 2014 – my picks

Bamboo on the Internet gets cut short this month. This particular post series is a bit fiddly to be done on a small tablet while I’m out and about in the world investigating a bamboo festival in South Korea and exploring the bamboo scene in Kyoto.

Date claimer

Entries are now open for the inaugural bamboo sculpture contest and exhibition in the delightful northern NSW town of Mullumbimby. Entries close 31 July. The competition will be judged on Saturday 6 September. Entry forms and more details can be found here.

• The latest Lexus RX350 uses bamboo instead of wood-veneer finishes.

• A 10 metre pink cat would not normally catch my atttention. This one, however, is crafted from bamboo using 3D printing technology. It is the centrepiece for the Shanghai Design Week and is expected to remain after the exhibition closes. The Dutch creator says he was inspired by meeting some of Shanghai’s famously friendly stray cats.

 

• Flavoursome chicken with fresh bamboo shoot? Delectable Naga pork ribs? In Delhi? DNAIndia reports that the Dzükou Tribal Kitchen, that features food from the mountainous state of Nagaland, is back. The decor features a small bamboo fountain, and a ceiling of dhokuwa, sourced from Assam, a traditional bamboo weave used as fences in village homes. The ingredients for the food arrive by train from Nagaland.

• The San Rafael Public Library are introducing the first-ever library cards made from bamboo.

• Love this. If you have to work in an office…

Ceiling detail

 

 

 

 

This is a factory refurbishment in Vietnam. The pliable bamboo ceiling conceals mechanical equipment and lighting fixtures.

Bamboo on the Internet for May 2014 – my picks

A bamboo art installation that you can climb on at the Israel Museum. It’s called 5,000 Arms to Hold You. Professional rock climbers were engaged to build it. While it is under construction there is a live webcam.

• A competition (open to US and Canadian residents only AND since expired) alerted me to the existence of bamboo easels and bamboo easel boxes.

• Two items from designboom.com are noteworthy for us this month: a kiosk for a bear rescue centre in Cambodia and bamboo plants inside an office in Shanghai. The kiosk supports the work of the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The park gets about 250,000 visitors annually. Their work combats the illegal trade in live bears and provides a safe sanctuary for rescued bears.

• Living bamboo is incorporated into the meandering central island of an open-plan office in Shanghai. The stands of bamboo, in large planters, create soft and unusual desk and room dividers. The central island, somewhat sadly, is made from timber. I’m sure the whole thing would have looked far superior had the architects chosen bamboo instead.

• Bamboo salt update: A recent study has established that 9X Bamboo Salt probably prevents obesity in mice. Although, in the experiment, the researchers first unnaturally induced obesity in the mice. Still, this gives some people hope that the same result is possible for people. The (refereed) journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology published the research. The numerous other health benefits of 9X bamboo salt still stand. See a previous post for more about that.
• A note from The Star online tells us that the dried ingredients for making dumplings for the Duan Wu festival cost more this year. This includes, of course, the dried bamboo leaf that wrap the dumplings. The dumplings, zongzi, are an important part of the annual Duan Wu celebration (dragon boat festival).  Why they are important is a matter of conjecture. The Star says it “originated from a practice to commemorate poet Qu Yuan, who drowned himself to protest against corrupt practices in China about 1,000 years ago. Back then, the local folk threw rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves into the river to prevent his remains from being eaten by fish.”  Here is a recipe if you need to practice for your local zongzi making competitions next year, like this one in Taichung, Taiwan:

Sources:

Park, K. Y., Ju, J. H., Song, J. L., & Moon, S. H. (2014). Anti-obesity effect of bamboo salt on diet-induced obesity in C57BL/6 mice (811.12). The FASEB Journal, 28(1 Supplement), 811-12.

Bamboo on the Internet for April 2014 – my picks

• Made with a bamboo frame, WakkaWater is a proposed solution for water shortages in Ethiopia. These giant ‘bamboo vases’ are easily constructed with local materials and can collect nearly 100 litres (over 25 gallons) of potable water in a day.

• Election time in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa, India provides a welcome boost to income for large numbers of people. Thousands of bamboo poles are needed to string party flags and banners, as well as frames and stands for campaigning. I wonder happens to all the bamboo after the election?

• The Patwari family in the Narail district of Bangladesh make bamboo fish traps of a design so old that no-one remembers how it came about. Bamboo is cut into the thin strips to make the traps. The family can make 2 or 3 fish traps a day.

• In the US? You could help support the red panda’s at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo with “I’m Not a Raccoon” Red Saison ale. The 6% alcohol traditional Belgian farmhouse ale is brewed with the main elements of the red panda diet – bamboo and mulberry leaves. DryBrew is donating a percentage of profits to the zoo’s Red Panda Wish List Fund

• Malaysian artist ‘Red’ Hong Si created a portrait of Jackie Chan using 64,000 bamboo chopsticks. Read why on her blog. There is also a short video of her and Mr Chan himself in a chopstick duel.

• An Irish explorer and his Vietnamese crew member were reunited 21 years after crossing the Pacific Ocean on a bamboo raft. Great looking craft. The book about the voyage, The China Voyage: Across The Pacific By Bamboo Raft was published in 1996 and the Vietnamese translation was released this month. You can learn more about the vessel here.

• More lovely bamboo accessories for ifolk. No electricity required for this portable speaker. The natural acoustics of the bamboo amplifies the sound. 

• Sabang (Philippines), is probably most famous for it’s underground river. If you stay around longer than a day tour, you may see the bamboo walkway through the mangroves that leads to a bird watching area and trails to the mountainside forest.

• And finally, for fans of strategic life simulation video games, the Sims 3 bamboo bedroom set. I marked it as ‘must have.’

Bamboo on the Internet for October – my picks

Art

Photo credit: WoodTV.com

This stunning sculpture kicks off the October bamboo on the Internet list. It’s made from bamboo and string. More photos at the artists Facebook page.

Personal

Bamboo gets very personal with these products:

• Washable handmade bamboo tampons on Etsy
  
• Underwear for space
• Bamboo toilet paper – same price as the regular stuff, and softer

Furniture (or art?)

Photo credit: http://www.designboom.com

This beautiful bamboo chair is named flow. It was created at Scope design studio in Taiwan. I’m glad I don’t have to clean it though. Follow the link to see the more practical set of nesting stools, (not made from bamboo) and more.

Mac accessories

Photo credit: Grovemade.com

I’m almost tempted to ditch Android for Mac just to make use of the range of bamboo accessories available. Two came to my attention this month: a roll-top iPad cover and a wonderfully minimalist docking station for an iPhone. These would go well with Bamboola’s bamboo iPhone cover.

Art installation

Wang Wen-Chih’s “The Light of Shodoshima”

If you’re lucky enough to get to the Woodford Folk Festival this year, you’ll be able to enter the amphitheatre through a 300 metre woven bamboo tunnel. The tunnel is this years special project. In collaboration with Cave Urban, it will be created by Taiwanese sculptor Wang Wen–Chih and team of volunteers. See more of Wang Wen-Chih’s work here. His installation, The Light of Shodoshima, pictured, is one of the many outdoor installations for this years Setouchi Triennale.

Sustainable outdoor cooking fuel

Bamboo charcoal for your barbecue? A start-up in the US is nearly ready to tap into the more than 80 percent of US households that own a barbecue grill. Hot Bambu is one of many Kickstarter projects. Have a look at the table below to see why you should be using bamboo charcoal.

COMPARE THE COALS

	HOT Bambú Lump Charcoal		Wood Lump Charcoal		Briquette Charcoal
	∞ Contains 100% natural bamboo charcoal ∞ Sustainable grilling from a rapidly renewable resource ∞ Does not contribute to deforestation ∞ Processed in a respectful and environmentally friendly way ∞ Burns clean with little smoke		• Contains trees cut from primary forest, plywood, pine (soft wood), and treated flooring scraps • Contributes to illegal logging and green house gas emissions • Creates mass soil erosion and devastation of natural habitat		x Contains ignite coal and sulfur, sodium nitrate (gun powder), limestone, starch, borax (fertilizer), charred sawdust, and toxic solvents that are confirmed to cause kidney and brain damage x Gives food the taste of fossil fuel