IMAGES OF NATURE

1999 & 2000

Keiko’s multi-modal installation gives the viewer a chance to unfold, to disarm completely, either in response to, or in emulation of, the fragile, transitory nature of her work. Deeply tactile, neither cerebral nor ironic, the textures (charcoal frottage on handmade paper) and dislocations (a typewriter coated a with birch bark-like paper “skin”) induce a disorienting, yet very welcome sense of being in the forest, alone with nature. A number of man made objects are “reclaimed” by a laborious process of paper coating and charcoal marks, and conversely, there are many tall “trees” made by the artist herself from the combined rubbings of various tree trunks. 

The objects wear the washi like a second skin that is a metaphoric representation of an essence that links all life forms. What is transferred from object to paper is the very soul of the natural object.

-Mary Thomas

Images Of Nature

1999

The arrangement of the exhibition Images of Nature at Fox Gallery, University of Pennsylvania was considered with the human scale in mind. The positioning of the chair acts as a reference to human presence. This was in an effort to stress the symbolic relationships between the human world as a space and the objects that occupy it.

An abundant rich society has been created. This stands in harsh contrast to the fact that the forest is a place of distribution. Cutting was a matter of connection. A connection between “here” and “wherever.”