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About
01
Onzai is a practice of arrangement and renewal. We work with materials that have already lived their first lives, branches, moss, stone, the things that have fallen. We compose them into forms that feel both spare and complete.
There is no artifice, no forcing dead wood to pretend at life. Instead we search for what these materials become when held together with intention. Each piece emerges from a conversation between what has ended and what remains.
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The artist
A practice begun quietly. Kept that way.
Edward Blee is the artist behind Onzai. He works from a studio in Palm Springs, gathering materials from the desert, the canyons, and the washes that run dry most of the year.
He has been arranging found objects for as long as he can remember. The work began quietly and stayed that way.
Process
A piece is the patient end of three steady acts. Each begins where the previous one quieted.
We walk the desert and the canyons. What we bring back has already finished its first life, a branch the wind shaped, a stone the rain wore, moss from a north-facing wall.
Pieces sit in the studio until they ask to be combined. A composition emerges slowly. Sometimes a single arrangement takes weeks. Nothing is forced into a form it does not want.
Each finished work is one of one. We deliver locally in Palm Springs when possible, and we crate carefully for those further afield. A piece is meant to live in a single room, for a long time.
02
Most pieces live in the studio in Palm Springs until they are claimed. Local pickup is encouraged for those nearby; for distant collectors, crating and freight is arranged on a per-piece basis.
Commissions are accepted in limited number each season. Write to us with the room, the light, the scale, and the rough budget. The conversation begins there.