By Petra Sakis

Recently, we had a visit from my wife’s brother, who lives in the Netherlands. He came to spend his holidays in Cyprus, and he brought along a gift for us. It was a pair of wooden shoes, the “Klompen” which is considered by many to be the national symbol of the Netherlands. It didn’t take long for me to imagine the shoe as a nice place to position a stone -- to use the shoe in place of a daiza. I started searching in my pile of rocks to find the right one to fit in the shoe. The one I used is called “picrolite.” It is composed of three minerals in the serpentine family, namely lizardite, chrysolite, and antigorite. A few years ago, I found this rock in a Troodos Mountains riverbed near an old asbestos mine. So the poetic name translates into “Shoe,” which represents the Netherlands, the “e,” which is for the electronic represented here by the green USB stick, and “Seki,” which is the stone. 

The idea was to display a modern version of Suseki since our lives are characterized by the advanced use of electronics and the interconnection between people in different parts of the world. The exchange of ideas and the use of different approaches and materials in order to express the custom of Suiseki.The shoe is 34 x 25 cm, and the stone is 10 x 7 x 16 cm and weighs about 2 kilograms.