handmade paper (kozo, mitsumata), sumi, LED
Gallery Yugen, Kyoto, Japan
Down an alleyway in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto is Gallery Yugen, a renovated storehouse gallery. For this exhibition, I hung tapestries of textured relief pulp paintings and created filters on spotlights to concentrate the light on the circles within the pulp works. There were also drawings with sumi ink on handmade mitsumata paper.
Storehouses in Japan were often “cavernous” themselves — dark, cool, and meant to protect annual goods from the elements. I embraced this, and aimed to create an installation that used pinpointed, directed light as opposed to natural light (which is non-existent in this space). The “cavern of stars” references earlier artist’s books of mine where I write about deep time and adventures into caves.
