All through my life, my art was very much a constant companion.
It was something I have to do. I do it. I have to do it for myself.
I'm a very private person and I feel like my work express
what I am not that interested in
in
articulating.
And that's probably my way of saying what's happening to me.
I was born in Japan. Our family is very practical people. And in Japan,
children tend to do what the parents or father was doing.
For all kinds of reasons, I was not good at school at all.
But art class I enjoyed it immensely and I was good at it.
When we came
to Richmond as a young couple
and I had time so I went to Virginia Museum
and I had wonderful art classes. Among them,
there's a class for Batik, meaning it's an ancient way to dye fabric.
And that's how it all started for me, that idea of using fabric,
dye and hands
to make something
transform from one stage to the other.
As the work evolved, my work became more personal
and I knew right away it's something I wanted to do for a long time.
And, that was lucky.
I'm not saying it was easy,
and for a woman
I was lucky
that I was able to raise children
but also have art career.
Silk is a thread
There is the silk worm
And then when they make the cocoon there's a thread.
Now this thread that I'm working on this is called kibiso.
Kibiso is a first 10 meters
of a so-called production of 3000 meters.
That's what one silkworm produce in their lifetime three thousand meters.
But the first ten meters when they started to spin is very rough and they're not quite
up to standard of the fine silk need.
So they used to throw it away. Stack this up, and throw it away.
You could see why they can it's too rough
They have all kinds of cocoons still sticking to it. And you can see that this is really no value.
But with a green movement, they started to see what can we do with this. It's a shame to throw it away.
So they started to give this to artists, designers
and it's a big success.
I see how rough
I really like it. And it smells really kind of primitive.
It is cut in this very short length.
But because I was doing
reconnected,
disconnected. For me I just put this together
and glue it and make a long thread out of it.
And that works for me, for my work because that's exactly what I'm doing now.
My work around this stage is very much about moving back to Richmond.
And this transition is very much about my life now.
Disconnect the relation,
reconnect the relation, new relations, and it's about connection.
I'm always very
interested in what will happen on our way to the end of the road.
For instance, this was flat at the beginning
and then I wanted them to become more wavy on the bottom part.
So I add more treads in here. Then, it becomes like the earth and water.
Maybe earth and sky.
But it's not obvious.
I probably have the feeling there must be all kinds of way to put silver leaf on top of this thread.
But to put it in a simple language, I smooch it.
Art making have their rhythm of their own.
For me when I'm working it talks to me
and it evolves,
and so in a way
I'm led by my nose many times to see what will happen.
And it does not mean you catch all your surprise because not all surprises are wonderful.
But when the pearl of a surprise happen, when you're working, you are there to catch it.
This one is kind of subtle to use. The two cultures are still trying to come together,
and you'd be surprised that you think
something knows.
It's still saying United States but it is very different.
This piece is more obvious,
North and South, kind of trying to merge. Because it's silk, it takes color beautifully.
The fabric used to be flat
and then this group of people, they started to challenge the flat fabric,
some like have of rusted nails, holes, burr holes.
Fabric itself becoming more intellectually challenging
and I like that kind of surprise. Like in human beings too when you get to know each other
and it's kind of nice to have
layers and layers of human experience come out.
That's what I enjoy very much about life
and cloth.
The recovery games were shown in an exhibition
along with a collection of historic textiles from my own collection. I was really interested in seeing
my work as it was evolving in conjunction with works in the past. I've always collected old
textiles mainly because they give me a chance to see what is possible within the medium. I'm working with and
there are extraordinary things made in the past that are not made any longer today
and the interesting thing happened someone attended the exhibition and
looked at all of my work and looked at the two galleries of historic textiles and said, "Why don't you
think about showing them together? Why don't you put your work next to a
textile which has a relationship to it well?"
I know why I don't and primarily that's because textiles of the past have a patina a patina of age
they have lived.
They've been part of a culture and so on whereas most artworks made today, at least when they're brand new,
don't have, they have not lived in the world, and I think that's a big difference.
Anyway, I came back to the studio
and I pulled out a few things from the collection to see if there was a kind of kernel of source there a
resource that I could begin to to build upon. So I have one textile here that I think is
interesting to look at because it is
specifically connected to
to what came next.
Years ago, I began collecting a
series of textiles that come from Indonesia.
These are skirts that are made hand-woven by women
and
then
heavily embroidered as you can see and these are made
to be formed into a tube which a woman wears as a skirt for a wedding event.
I love this one.
In part because of the color most of which comes from natural dyes,
the elaboration on the surface and especially I love the language in this that I
had translated several years ago, and it says, "Hello. My name is so-and-so", the woman tells you her name,
"made with great care if you borrow, please take great care of this."
So I thought hey, maybe I can go someplace with that.
Second thing that happened.
I thought what am I going to make the work from and I happen to be cleaning here in my studio
and I was up in this loft space up above and I came across a bag
black plastic bag full of old Japanese kimonos.
Specifically 28 of them. I had not looked at them for years.
Since a group of us, I think there were six, each invested $100 and we bought a 400 pound bale of
kimonos from Japan. In the 70s,
they were exported like we export old Levi's to other countries of the world. The Japanese were no longer
wearing kimonos for daily wear
and they had tons of material that were then exported to other parts of the world where they could sell them.
So I opened of the bag, and I began to look at the textiles.
And I thought, this is maybe an interesting potential. What if I
take the kimono apart and use the actual fabric in something new that I'm making?
So much of the artwork produced in the 20th century,
that is part of the modernist movement, is really rooted in
simple geometric abstraction.
The love of the grid a very important
subject matter for many artists in the 20th century. And for me
it was kind of fascinating to think about the grid in human experience.
How do we use it on a daily basis? And once again in line with the game-playing
idea that I've had, I was thinking about the game of hopscotch, and how young children at an early age take a
piece of chalk, mark the pavement and then participate by jumping
through a sequence of rectangles or squares.
And
actually inhabiting this...
the rigid grid with their bodies, then ultimately of course the weather comes and it washes those chalk marks away.
So this notion about this intersecting line is interesting in those terms.
The intersecting line vertical and horizontal is also at the basis of the way a textile is constructed of
the warp and the weft of the textile. Further it is
every textile is a disciplining of
pliable lines.
So I'm thinking about all of those things in relation to one another
and I decided to do another game piece that was based on a familiar game, and this is the game of hopscotch.
I set out to do a drawing which represented the playing field with marks representing four different games...
approaches to drawing the game of hopscotch on the playground field and again
I'm using the divisions that go back to the very first series of game pieces that I did and
as I turned the image in the first of those game pieces,
each of the hopscotch games is oriented in a different direction so I maintain all of those rules these games.
I produced the center panel then added the two side panels in order to
create the sense of a
playing area that was contained and I was actually thinking about taking an airplane in from LaGuardia
into, New York City and seeing those playgrounds,
which are bounded by chain-link fence. The real world is on the outside the playing field is on the inside. And
some pretty rough neighborhoods surrounds some of these places where kids play.
So to kind of give this a sense of field and location, I developed the composition. And then as
all of that was arriving at a point of completion, I kept saying there's something missing.
And, in order to explore what might be
missing, I took some rope, went into the large room next door,
stood up above and threw the rope as though I was playing the game.
I played the game as a child, and I thought perhaps in playing the game again, I would find the answer to this piece.
Actually in throwing the rope, I began to find that it took on
configurations that really were expressive of the gesture of the body moving through space. And that is how I finally
arrived at the composition of this bead-like element,
which is sewn to the acrylic which covers each of these pieces.
Perhaps you can see this is a figure, a head, arms and legs, boots...
I mean it's kind of like a little bit of a mad Russian dancer or something with a sort. Nevertheless,
expressing something of the gesture and the energy that occurs in relationship to the game.
I think I was quite fortunate in the timing of...
in timing to have entered
UCLA
a much more mature person. I entered UCLA the second or third time in
1960 and
it was a time when
it seemed like a
logical way to go an art
career was very a very positive thing.
They were building... the state university system was being built each with
dramatic
facilities for art.
The arts program, then the high schools were very very strong with enormous
support from parents. And
we had California design
showcasing the work of artists
so that you we had
we had faculty who were supportive who encouraged us to go into the art field and
we also could see a way of perhaps getting a
job in the universities because they were building so many of them.
And then also we could have our work showcased in
California design once every three or four years. I forget what it was.
And so the idea of becoming an art major looked very promising. I met my wife,
Veralee, at that particular time, and she and I ended up getting excellent jobs in
local junior high and senior high schools. And we perform beautifully and we were extremely happy.
But by the
mid-60s,
we began to think that there was even perhaps more to life. I mean we were it was such a bullion period in
the history of the United States. John Kennedy had given us so much hope. And,
we were looking around for venues of
other things to do, because that's the kind of attitude we have, the attitude wasn't to amass money,
it was you have life experiences. And
it turned out we heard about a program in Oaxaca
that educated teenagers, teenage women, young girls from all over the United States and
eventually, we bought into that business and in
1970,
much to the horror of our families we moved to Oaxaca with our two young girls...
babies actually and
began a program which introduced
to teenagers from the United States
the culture of southern Mexico which was and still is
extremely vibrant.
For more infomation >> video 1506423072 - Duration: 0:46. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét