Yuko Takada Keller

Tracing paper artist
From the home page of her website - http://www.yukotakada.com/ - she has so many interesting things to say about this material.  I also love how poetic she is.

Welcome to my Home Page. I am Yuko Takada Keller, living in Helsinge, Denmark since 1997. I am a Japanese Artist and showing my work not only in Denmark but also in some other European countries as well as Japan. I also curate some exhibitions to intoduce Japanese artists in Denmark. I use tracing paper for my art.
About myself and my work
I'm interested in using tracing paper, because it creates a sense of transparency and etherealness in my work. But when I was inUniversity, I majored in weaving. Then I wove woolen tapestries for some years. Before I entered University, I was impressed by the Northern European tapestries that I saw in a museum in Kyoto. This led me to major in weaving at University. However, while weaving the tapestries, I gradually wanted to express something different in my work. Then I took a trip to Northern Europe to see the tapestries there. Of course, I was very impressed by them, but I was more impressed by the magnificent scenery. I had never had that kind of feeling before in Japan. After this trip, I started to make my work using paper. At first, I used Japanese paper "washi". But I couldn't represent a sense of transparency with this paper. I tried to use various materials to represent a sense of transparency. Then I ran into tracing paper. "The Spread" is the first work where I used tracing paper. I colored the paper with acrylic color, then tore it into many pieces, and sewed them together. It gave me a feeling of transparency. I realized some possibilities using tracing paper. Because, while each piece has its own rhythm and direction taken in its entirety it seems to become something other than simple tracing paper. While making 2-dimensional works with tracing paper, I wanted to make pieces that were more 3-dimensional. I wanted to install my work in a space, not only hanging on a wall. "Prismatic" is the second work that I installed 3-dimensionally. It is one of my favorite works. It is composed of 7,500 pyramids. The theme of "Prismatic" is a shower of light that I felt in nature. "Prismatic" was traveling in U.K. in 1991 and in Canada from 1993 to 1995. When I was making "Hazy forest", I began to be conscious that tracing paper has not only a transparency but also an untransparency. I feel there is something like a skin membrane between a transparency and an untransparency. I glue small pieces which were torn in plane, then I install it in a space. Using this technique, I have been making some works. They have been getting larger or the parts themselves have been 3-dimensional. "Water fort" is one of the larger works. I made it from an image I saw in a dream. The story is like this: I was flying in the sky. It was above the water. I had no idea if the water was the sea or a lake or somewhere else. But it was really beautiful water. When I landed on the water, suddenly, the water stood up like a wall. Then I could walk through the water. I often have such strange dreams. After I've had this kind of dream, I don't understand if the dream is true or not. Sometimes I'm confused whether something is my dream or my memories, or maybe it's true. In 1993, I traveled in Tanzania. It was a harsh world. I experienced the life of no water. It made me feel strongly how important water is not only for a human being but also for all lives in the world. Of course, I knew that intellectually. But it was the chance to consider life itself. After this trip, I made "Water roots". The water is the source of our life. I imagined there is incalculable energy under the ground as the "Water roots". In 1995, I got into a small slump. It wasn't so serious. But at that time, I was thinking about the skin membrane in my mind. The skin membrane in our mind sometimes tempt and control human's desire. According to the Buddhist thought, there are 108Bonnou in our mind. Bonnou means desire. "Pleats of a mind" consisted of 108 pieces, because they symbolically represent human desire in this work. This work was exhibited at the event "Container 96", a part of the celebration of Copenhagen as European Cultural Capital 1996.
From 1996, I have been using tiny small triangle pieces in my work. It symbolizes something like a molecule. A molecule of water or light or air. I would like to draw like a pointillism with this small piece as a molecule. "Between the Air" represents something like this feeling. When I am conscious of a skin membrane in the air, I can feel invisible things. It's something we have already forgotten or we don't try to see. But we have to remember, and we have to try to see. There is a value in this invisible world. "Expectation" is the last work I made before moving to Denmark in 1997. There are so many pieces combined with thin wire. It makes me feel the light is shining upon us, or rising up to our dream. Spring of 1997, my life in Denmark started, and I gave birth to my son in the end of this year at 39 years of age. I had a chance to reconsider about life itself. In the same time, I started to make my work to represent how respectable things we can make by our own hands. While considering the past of my life, I wanted to inform about that to the next generation like my son, because the new waves flushed away tons of information, and people will forget about the analogue way and so on. “C of Infornmation” came from that kind of idea. It represents the human who are floating on the discarded CD-ROMs which has already been thrown away, because there is no more useful (new) information there. That's why, I also use Origami-Technique as a typical analogue way. After, I moved to Denmark, I had my first solo exhibition at Gjethuset in Frederiksvaerk in 1999.   “Life of the Blue” which I showed at my second solo exhibition at Portalen in Greve in January 2000 is my masterpiece in these 10 years. In the spring of 1999, my mother died and I get another opportunity to reconsider about humans life and my appreciation to my mother. There are about 50,000 tiny small triangle pieces in this work, and each single pieces has life even if you can't find the life. There are many important things (life) around us, but we can't find them, because we haven't tried to see carefully. So, at the beginning of using tracing paper, I hoped my works would remind the viewer of something pure and natural in this world. Of course, I love and cherish the natural world, but I was interested in only the pure or beautiful world in nature. When I began to be conscious of a skin membrane in the tracing paper, I wanted to represent something more, not only pure or natural, in this world. It's sometimes in our mind. Yuko Takada Keller
Tracing paper has a transparency and an untransparency. I'm interested in how tracing paper is like a skin membrane. The skin membrane lies between dream and reality. The skin membrane lies between consciousness and behavior. The skin membrane is there when life is born. The skin membrane is part of a human being. I want to represent the space that people are aware of The skin membrane is unconsciousness.

Fumio Hirakawa and Marina Topunova

Hope Tree

Architecture firm, 3o Studio.  Paper cut out, LED lighting, in a shipping container. Created for 2010 Tokyo Designers Week.

The shapes that have been deliberately cut in the paper are like the ones I have captured at times through random interactions of cut shapes and light.  At the same time they are picking up reflected shapes.

Intended as an environmental piece.

Bridget Riley

Appreciation - and the diagonals
In looking for titles for my cut paper hangings that point to their poetic aspect, I have turned to Bridget Riley's diagonal lozenge paintings which I saw for the first time at her Tate Britain show in 2003. Several galleries of them, huge, immersive in the field of colour and light that they projected.  I don't think I have ever been filled with such joy by an exhibition: the dynamic of the upward-tilting shapes, the play with the geometry (lozenges slipping out of their columns), the interactions of so much saturated colour - and then the titles, which release  the paintings from pure forms into the natural world. With lyrical simplicity, as in 'From here', 'Ease', 'New Day', 'High Sky','Reflection', 'Shade', 'June'.  

I am recognising how influential she has been on me.  Her aesthetic: clear, beautiful, an appeal to the senses, an engagement with the phenomenon of perception.  Her gender: one of the few women artists who gained recognition and standing as early as the sixties. Her staying power: how she's kept going for over fifty years now, constantly evolving.  In my studio I have pinned up right in front of where I work a photo of her standing in her studio in front of one of her more recent curvy paintings, with beneath a quote from her:

    Those who continue to work at something they love seem blessed.

Yes.

I realise that she's so obvious to me, so present in my art life, that I have failed to do any research on her.  So I wanted to focus for a while on these diagonal paintings, and have turned to the catalogue from that 2003 exhibition.  This has been a revelation as to the complexity of her thinking (knowing that she composed the paintings from painted lozenge shapes has affected my interpretation of them, as a relationship between surface shapes and colours).  

Up until the mid-80s BR had been working with stripes, straight and curving.  Through the early 80s she had been in a transitional phase, moving from works that built up a tension between sensations that released a perceptual experience, to ones that 'take sensation as the guiding line and build, with the relationships it demands, a plastic fabric which has no other raison d'etre except to accommodate the sensations it elicits' (BR).  So, a movement from the painting as a stimulant to a self-contained world.  Her stripey paintings grew more and more complex and she realised she needed to return to first principles. 

These were:
1.  composition - the architecture of the painting, the relation of form and colour
2.  the relation between the painting and nature - addressing the direct visual sensations of being in nature that precede interpretation and evaluation, that are immediate and fresh; complex relationships between space, line, tone and colour which 'provide a vehicle for those things which cannot be objectively identified but which nevertheless can be expressed in this way.' (BR) So immediate and suggestive.
Sensation central to both of these.

In 1986, as a way of exploring the internal relationships of a painting, she began to disrupt the vertical stripes with truncated diagonals (in 'Broken Gaze').

 This offset and opposed the verticality. But the effect is limited by the diagonals being contained within the stripes.  Her next move was to let them overrun, creating a lattice effect that opens up depth, a dynamic depth in which shapes advance and recede.  (This is what I hadn't noticed before because of my knowledge about the paintings' composition.)  There is a tension between complexity (which could fall into chaos) and control.  There is a new relationship between painting and viewer who now is drawn into the painting, maybe reading it sequentially, or moving from one area of colour and shape to another, or in and out of its depth. The early paintings pulsed, these unfold in time - they are a visual journey.

Ease, 1987

These paintings developed over the next 11 years, becoming more and more complex to the point where they risked fracturing.  The viewer was faced with something increasingly multifocal with the eye needing to be correspondingly more restless. 

High Sky 2, 1992

In some of the late ones harmony is restored by using larger visual units.  Nevertheless it was time to move on - into the current work which uses large curvy shapes.

But overall in this phase BR created paintings that realised 'a kind of place' (BR), 'a virtual arena defined entirely in terms of the spatial properties of form and colour' - but ones that could suggest to the viewer another place, one in the natural world.

I feel somewhat humbled that I borrowed the simple lozenge shape from these works for my cut hangings, thinking of it initially as an isolated unit - one that I could easily cut.  At the same time, I have had to consider composition: the shapes have to be placed down somehow.  The grid was an obvious choice for its simplicity; I wanted the minimum distraction from the light phenomena I was setting up and inviting. 

Thinking about BR's aim of creating 'a kind of place' helps me understand a little more clearly my own work.  Because it is an interaction between a material and natural light, it points more readily to the natural world both physically and imaginatively.  The first, originally called 'Align' - a visual description - I'm now re-titling 'Longing to touch', because when I look at those triangles coming into alignment, that evokes an emotional response in me.  'Scatter', now 'Just this one high sky' for me can't help but evoke sky through its colour and the movement of clouds through the upward drift of the shapes, even though there was no intention in this. The last piece I've made 'By the grace of a low branch' was directly influenced by seeing sunlight on leaves - and my own need to offset line with curve.  So the phenomenon of perception - the interaction between light and eye - is at their root but they are definitely not a self-contained space.  The light passes through them, they are just an object in its path.

Bill Viola at St Pauls

The Martyrs
This was hard to find, smaller than expected - and one of the screens wasn't working.
For me, size was an issue as I am familiar with the power of life-size figures in BV's videos.

My reading of the work was that the figures were dead, martyred as the title said, and that they were undergoing a process of purification through one of the four elements in order to 'ascend into heaven'; each eventually faced upwards and became bathed in silver life, an expression of surrender and bliss on their faces.  So I was aware of two invisibilities - the torture they had been through and the heaven they were heading towards. 

BV's explanation was somewhat different: that each video began at a point of pause in their suffering when an element began to disturb their stillness; the elements are metaphors for 'the darkest hour of the martyr's passage through darkness into light'. He describes a martyr as a witness (to their truth?) with a capacity to bear pain and death in order to remain faithful to their beliefs. 

The videos in characteristic slo-mo which invites contemplation - in tension with the need to flit visually between screens to check whether something new is starting to happen.  The inwardness of the actors' expressions also connected me to my own inner world; having suffered immensely, they were now going through something completely mysterious - the bardo of dying.  Presumably still more powerful if you belong to a faith that honours martyrdom.

emptiness

A philosophy of emptiness
Gay Watson, Reaktion Books 2014

chapter 7, Artistic Emptiness 
In contemporary art, the theme of emptiness manifests in the breakdown of barriers; a focus on process rather than product; playing in the space that is revealed; new forms tentatively emerging. 

A forerunner of emptiness is the idea of the sublime, defined as experience that exceeds our perceptual or imaginative grasp, that marks the limit of reason. Today the sublime has come to intimate not transcendence/other but immanence - 'The sublime is NOW' (Barnett Newman) - and which expresses wonder, a sense of complexity and beauty.

There are many western artists who have become familiar with the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, finding in them reflections of and responses to contemporary concerns. Expressions of emptiness in their work. Others have come to some understanding of emptiness through the popularisation of physics. The western mind seems to have a tendency to interpret emptiness nihilistically, as a lack or loss, rather than as both emptiness and fullness/ potential.

                                                   '...a space
                         utterly empty, utterly a source...'
                                                 (Seamus Heaney)

Discusses writing, music and dance.

On visual art, GW argues that the most significant movements in 20th century art were away from representation and classical perspective and toward the ephemeral, formless, contingent.

Phenomenon of immersion in pure colour e.g. Reinhardt, Klein, Rothko, Turrell - resulting in the loss of sense of distance, perspective.  

Artists using light and natural world to enhance experience.  Quotes a press release for a Turrell show which says: 'Light like this is seen rarely with the eyes open yet it is familiar (similar?) to that which can be apprehended with the eyes closed in lucid dream, deep meditation and near death experiences.'  And Eliasson referring to 'what I sometimes call the introspective quality of seeing: you see whatever you're looking at, but you also see the way you're seeing.'

Other artists use their work to draw attention to attention itself: Martin, Celmins, Irwin, Tuttle, Whiteread, Viola.  Show relationship between emptiness and formation, often requiring focused attention on the abstract or silent.

Kiefer, Walter de Maria, Kapoor, Gormley.

Emptiness if ambiguous: it can hold both escape/release and loss/failure.  Art has the capacity to hold that ambiguity legitimately.

Space that is empty can be emphasised by the inclusion of a single simple object.  Or it can be the whole subject of the work.

Attention - the need for both in creation and viewing - is the common thread in these artists.

Photography - cites a number of artists working with an oriental aesthetic.  Photo as tathata; photography as a tool for challenging the assumption that the world is just the way it appears at first sight.  Camera-less photography (qv) seems to be particularly successful in expressing ephemerality.

Connection with the meditating mind which puts the space of awareness around its objects.

Challenging 'the complacency of seeing', asking us 'to look more closely, with more attention, below the surface, around and within substance, in the silence between sounds, to find an unconventional way of seeing reality - to see, hear and think afresh.'

Yinka Shonibare

The British Library

Installation in the old reference library at Brighton Museum as part of the 2014 Brighton Festival. 

I heard YS in discussion with Hofesh Schechter, artistic director of the festival, on 7 May. Lots of interesting points especially on immigration, but for me in particular:

His approach to the installation: it was low budget, he could have covered all the old bookshelves and turned the room into a gallery space, but he decided - as he put it - to let the space give him the work, to be his muse i.e he worked from what was already there, the empty bookshelves, the library environment, the vestiges of its past.  

[Although this is a well-established way of responding to site, there was something moving about the way he spoke that reinforced the approach which I connected how I want to work with my commission at Brighton Buddhist Centre.]

He also talked about authenticity: that the kind of fabric he uses everything thinks of as African and that he's making a point about colonialism when he splices it into typically British subjects.  He takes pleasure in the fact that it's in fact Dutch-Indonesian in origin, so the use of it parodies authenticity.  (Of course it still makes a point about colonialism. . . )

phenomenology

Understanding phenomenology
David R Cerbone (Acumen 2006)
Ch 4 on Merleau-Ponty
M-P's phenomenology aims to describe our embodied perceptual experience of the world, our sense of subjectivity and emerging object - before we divide our experience into subject and object.
Slogan: "I am open to the world" - to direct experience without analysing, naming, explaining, judging
This openness is however intentional in that we choose to engage with particular people, objects, situations.  What we engage with is always within a context or ground and emotional response is not separate from it; the experience is imbued with that emotion.  You can't split the physiological and psychological.
It's open-endedness means that 'nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see'.

Gay Watson in 'A philosophy of emptiness' ( Reaktion Books 2014) says that M-P thought we tended to take a representational view of bodily experience, and that he wanted us to question this and really see what was going on through a practice of attentiveness.  He wrote: 'True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world.'
The idea of presence is key; mind/body and subject/world are abstractions from this - 'reinstating the embodied subject as one that is never  distinct and separated, but always intentionally related to the world'.  A person has a dynamic relation with the world, is connected.  Being embodied one is both visible and seeing.