The Scone ADFAS presents this lecture by Professor Mary Cante-Helm OBE.
Tuesday 15 September 2026, 6.30pm
Scone Arts & Crafts Hall Kingdon St, Scone
Members free, Guest $30
Refreshments will be served after lecture.
Note: cash, cheque or bank transfer prior to the lecture only (no credit card).
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MARY CANTE-HELM
Professor Cante-Helm is a long-established Lecturer of The Arts Society with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art. She has most recently served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, as Visiting Professor at Northumbria University, and as a Member of the Board of Governors of the University for the Creative Arts. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and has held senior academic positions at various UK universities.
She is widely published and has lectured throughout the UK and abroad. She is also an experienced cruise speaker and a Resident Historian with Viking Cruises, lecturing on many aspects of Asian Art and East-West Encounters. She was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations, and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette by the Government of Japan in 2019.
THE ART OF THE JAPANESE GARDEN: From Tradition to Modernity
This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for understanding the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japanese love of nature and the changing seasons has manifested itself in paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens surrounding aristocratic palaces and Buddhist temples, as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens with strikingly symbolic content. The lecture also draws upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design, an approach successfully adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens abroad.