Yayoi Kusama

Once the Abominable War is Over, Happiness Fills Our Hearts  by Yayoi Kasuma   2010  Acrylic on Canvas  194 x 194 cm

Yayoi Kusama exhibited this past spring at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and although I was in Toronto while the exhibition was up, I did not attend.  For one thing, it was difficult to get tickets, you had to book months ahead for a specific time.  Then towards the end of the exhibition, the art gallery sold timed tickets if people lined up outside before the gallery opened.  Too much hoopla for me - I didn't participate.

Yayoi Kusama 

When we were in London England in 2012 for my graduation exhibition from Middlesex (and the oral exam (the VIVA)) an exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern had just come down.  People told me that I should have gone, I would have loved it.  So I did purchase the catalog for that show.  Last week I finally read it.
Well, her work is very impressive.   I was especially interested in the determination she demonstrated during her early career and wrote a bit about that on my Modernist Aesthetic blog,  

This 89 year old artist is riding the popular culture train  and has touched many hearts with her joyful dots that cover everything.  Lots of books available about her, and she is all over the internet.  Here, here and a video here.

Itchiku Kubuta : Symphony of Light

chou / the first blush of winter (detail) by Itchiku Kubuta 

I went to see the Itchiku Kubota exhibition at the textile museum last weekend, not prepared for the awe I was to experience.

Symphony of Light: Seasons by Itchiku Kubuta
Ryou/Certitude 1986,  Kuo / Change 1986 and Hin / Nostalgia 1987
tie-dyeing, ink painting, embroidery on silk crepe

Itchiku Kubuta (1917 - 2003) apprenticed with a dyer who specialised in hand painting and resist dyeing when he was 14 years old and established his own studio 5 years later (age 19).  The following year, while visiting a museum, he saw a fragment of Tsujigahana dyed kimono silk from the Maromachi period (16th century) that inspired him for the rest of his life.

Symphony of Light: Seasons
Hou / Late autumn melencholy 1987,  Kou / Twixt autumn and winter 1989, Ei / Unexpected Snow 1989
 and Sei / blue Trace of hope in sudden snow  1989,
tie dyeing, ink painting, embroidery on silk crepe

"it carried a quality that was plaintive and mysterious.  I continued to look at that small piece of fabric, as if placed under a spell, for over three hours"  Itchiku Kubata

He devoted himself to reviving this ancient dyeing method, and eventually succeeded in 1981.   

Symphony of Light by itchiku Kubuta
Chou / The  First Blush of Winter 1986 and Kan / Never Ending Snowfall
tie-dyeing, ink painting, embroidery on silk crepe

He wanted to create panoramic visions of the subtle but swift passage of time and nature through the seasons and decided to create 80 kimonos that would connect to each other, sleeve to sleeve as a continuous canvas.

He was 63 years old when he began.

Itchiku Kubuta completed twenty-nine kimono for autumn and winter and five for the universe before he died at 86.  An additional two for the universe were created by his assistants posthumously.

Symphony of Light: The Universe  by Itchiku Kubuta 

It's his vision that I find awesome and humbling.
He started his larger than life project with no hesitation about his own mortality....as if he truly felt that he had all the time in the world. 

His canvas references the human form in the kimono shapes, connecting to each other, arm to arm.

Each is made one at a time over a lengthy period of time....going through multiple laborious steps.

It is grand.  They are sublime.

There is a museum in Japan devoted to this man.

The website shows the Symphony of Light kimonos in a continuous line.  click here.

Ohn
Mount Fuji Against Golden Layers of Clouds  2000 by Itchiku Kubuta
tie-dyeing, ink painting, embroidery on silk crepe

Kubota also created individual kimono.
Three of his Mount Fuji kimonos were on display.

detail of Ohn by Itchiku Kubuta

Frank Stella said:

"I don't like to say I have given my life to art.

 I prefer to say that art has given me my life"

Amate

Nuno designers Reiko Sudo and Alfred Bimbaum were inspired by the amate paper made from tree bark by the Otomi peoples of central Mexico.  

They named the velvet and paper cloth they created in 2000 Amate.   

a grid of washi paper 

Textile samples like these were an important part of the exhibition Reiko Sudo + Nuno: textiles from Japan held last fall at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte Ontario.  The samples covered a wall where participants were invited to PLEASE TOUCH.

Amate was my favourite of the variety of  NUNO cloths that dressed the 22 columns in the gallery.
It has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Historically, the Japanese word, nuno, meant cloth that was not made from silk, but over time, the word has evolved to define the unusual cloths that Reiko Sudo and her collaborators have created from natural and synthetic fibres over the last thirty years.

The wabi sabi beauty of the Norah Rosamond Hughes gallery itself, lovingly restored in the historic woolen textile factory, reminds us that everything changes and that there is beauty in age.

I've written more about this international exhibition on modernist aesthetic, here.

nui project

hand work by Keisuke Nomaguchi (born 1976)  nylon-wool yarn, cotton thread, hand stitch

embroidered ready made shirt by Keisuke Nomaguchi
His stitches cover the surface, and the shirt shrinks by more than half, becoming very thick.

embroidered ready made shirt by Setusko Mori (born 1955).
Her stitches overlap themselves,and she repeats them to achieve dot-like shapes.

detail of above   (cotton shirt, cotton threads, hand stitch)

These images are from the Nui Project books, documents of the embroidery work made at a rehabilitation facility for mentally handicapped people in Kagoshima Japan, Shobu Gakuen.   The Nui Project uses ready-made shirts as a base for embroidery. That the shirts become impossible to wear as they become distorted with embroidery stitches that have no names adds magic.  Or nature.

"The work is composed within the constraints of the extremely narrow scope of the immediate visual field.......Staying within that narrow scope of the field of view, without a plan for the composition as a whole, generates an emergence, an unfolding, that evokes the beauty created by nature."   Shin Fukumori, director of Kobo Shobu

The content in this post is taken from two books, Nui Project and Nui Project 2.  The books were published in commemoration of the exhibition held at the creative growth art center in Oakland California in 2003, Fabulous Fabrics: Made in Japan, Yukiko Koide curator.

The books were recommended to me by Sandra Brownlee and by Karen Thiessen.

the aesthetic of distress

Chiyoko Tanaka,  Brown #602 grinded hand woven fabric 1989

Chiyoko Tanaka from Japan weaves cloth and then wrecks it.   Her process leaves tiny holes in the surface of her work, allowing light to shine through.  

Chiyoko Tanaka, Blue RF #601  grinded fabric rubbed with white stone 1989

The weaving process is one of accumulation.  Weft threads repeatedly go over and under the warp threads for a lengthy period of time.  Thus woven cloth is about growth and about space and the warp threads (the time it took) eventually become invisible.  Chiyoko then makes time visible again when she places her finished beautiful linen, silk or ramie cloth on the ground and rubs it with a brick or a stone. She calls this body of work "Grinded Fabric".

"For me the act of weaving, as the weft threads accumulate one by one, is a representation of time passing away..... Placing the fabric on the ground, I trace out the ground texture and grind out the surface of the fabric.  .. The true past tense of the verb to grind, "ground" , also implies the earth, which is used to embed, erode and emboss its own surface into my work."  Chiyoko Tanaka 

Chiyoko Tanaka, mud dyed cloth, poppy seed oil  Permeated fabric 1983

Sometimes, this artist covers her cloth with mud and occasionally pours oil onto it. Again, the time it takes for mud and oil to be absorbed into the cloth, is very important to her process.  She uses the term "permeated".

"I enjoy the sense of addition from a new dimension: on one plane you already have the criss-crossing of the fibres, and now, from above, a new element gently descends and starts spreading outwards from its centre.  For me, this is a symbol of gravity: energy toward the centre of the earth."  Chiyoko Tanaka

All images and quotations here are from Art Textiles of the World Japan
There's a new post about Chiyoko Tanaka on modernist aesthetic. 

I'm still thinking about weaving and the connections that cloth has to human mortality.

a reverence for nature and time

We've had more snow and more cold temperatures this winter than any other since I was a child.  To mark this, I took my new woolen piece outside to photograph.  With the snow blanket.

I had just re-read this book .
I learned that in Japan, red and white cloth is used to denote a village festival or other kind of celebration. 
That the Japanese aesthetic is sensitive to nature.
That there is a reverence for those moments briefly glimpsed.

The passage of time is important  in the Japanese aesthetic and there is a kind of beauty in the accumulation of time.  

A reverence.

 

little still places

Why am I so attracted to dots?
I purchased little bits of dotted cloth in the cities I visited last spring.   Me, who usually only buys white fabric.

I like them best when they are almost but not quite in a grid.  This red and white as well as the blueish one below are by Japanese designer Naomi Ito . Wabi sabi, perfect imperfection.

Both were found at raystitch when Ned and I were in London last June.  The shop itself is not as commercial as the web site makes out.

The detail shows that this cloth is really two layers. 

  Jung says that tiny spots are archetypal symbols of the mysterious creative, the starting point from which all things arise.

  I think of them as representing all of us who are alive, so small.  Just specks. 

 All different.  All the same.  

 Last May, when April and I visited New York, we made a pilgrmage to habu textiles and I bought half a yard of this black and red dot.

Not only are there three layers in this fabric, the dots are actually holes.  I love that., I'm attracted to that.  But I do not want to say exactly why because I do not know.  

John Paul Morabito burns dot-holes into his weaving and  I've quoted his artist statement about why he does this on my modernist aesthetic blog.  

Two from Finland, Two from Japan

I have made the final selection of artists that I want to write about for my dissertation.

I kept changing my mind. At first I wanted to write about artists whose work was similar to mine.

Then I wanted to write about artists whose work was similar to Agnes Martin's.


Then I decided to go with my own emotional pull to the work.





the above image is by Noriko Narahira from Japan
from her Scenes of White series 1999
machine stitch, felt

Aino Kajaniemi from Finland
Memory 2008 tapestry

I found that there just is not enough information about some artists, and this discouraged me. I would find an image of them in a book, but nothing online. Especially artists of the generation before me - still working, but not as digitally savvy as we need to be today. This made me realize how important the Internet is. I imagine that the Internet is changing how young people learn about art. Merja Winqvist from Finland
Tree 2002 paper, shellac

I prefer books, but was introduced to many artists from my two chosen cultures, Japanese and Finnish on the web. Kyoko Kumai from Japan
Blowing in the Wind 1999
stainless steel filament

These four are my final choices, selected because their work is simple, emotional, rooted in labour, grounded in nature, based on repetition, and expresses concern for our world.

metaphysics of the ordinary

"Avoid the use of unnecessary notes" Jean Sibelius, (Finland) "When I take everything away, I have the feeling that I can find a place of repose and I can absorb the universe within me" Tetsuo Fujimoto (Japan) "I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel, that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." Vincent Van Gogh