TWU Sculptural Ceramics 2012: Kristina Smith

Tomoko Amaki Abe

Tomoko Amaki Abe was born in Japan and received her BA in Painting, in 1994 from the Edinburgh College of Art. She uses various materials in her work, such as ceramics, printmaking and photographic techniques, as well as mixed media installations, as a means of exploring the tension between transience and permanence. She is also particularly interested in the process of deterioration as an artistic motif - how subtle forces in the environment can destroy seemingly robust objects over time, how lost objects can regain life and recover inner energy, and how reminiscence of what used to exist may be sensed in the remains.

Her V-shaped installation, “Gauze Fall,” was cast using shreds of gauze dipped into slip, fired and arranged on the wall like cascading brush strokes. She inherited the gauze from her grandfather, a doctor who lost a leg while fighting for Japan during World War II. “As a child I watched him treat his leg with gauze every night,” Abe said. When the pieces of “Gauze Fall” were fired, the gauze burned away, leaving only the clay, “like a fossil,” she said, “like a memory.” (source: NYTimes)

I am drawn to the fragility in much of Abe’s work. The fragile surfaces lend a sense of tension, and also temporality to the work. The parallel between the temporary and fragile nature of the work, speaks to the very challenge of the fragile and temporary lives that we lead today.