Japanese artist Mariko Kusumoto grew up on the island of Kyushu in a 400-year-old Buddhist temple where her father was the priest. As a girl she was surrounded by spirituality and tranquillity, and became very aware of the history of her surroundings:
‘I treasure the time spent playing on the grounds and finding pieces of relics, such as shards of ceramics and parts of tools that had been buried for many, many years’.
One of her chores as a child was to polish the elaborately crafted metal ornaments around the temple, which eventually led to her 20-year artistic career in metalwork creating surreal multi-layered assemblages.
In 2013 Kusumoto finished her most ambitious piece in metalwork, Pachinko Voyage (below, right), it was complex in technique and took a year to complete. Exhausted by the work, Kusamoto wanted to move on to something more abstract, in a totally opposite material. Her fiber works are the outcome of this shift to abstraction, and she is surprised by how different they are, stating that they look like the work of a completely separate artist.
The new body of delicate fiber works consists of sculpture and jewellery inspired by natural forms; coral, mushrooms and flowers amongst other organisms. To create these ethereal pieces Kusumoto uses the traditional origami-like folding technique tsumami zaiku. Other pieces use a method of heat-setting synthetic fabric.
The wearable pieces shift back and forth between jewellery to sculpture, as they are intended to be displayed in the house as sculpture when not being worn. When worn, the works submit to new shapes and colours as they stretch to fit the body.
Some of the forms contain smaller shapes within them, perhaps alluding to Kusumoto’s love for elaborate packaging. Japan has an elaborate gift culture, whereby the intricate packaging is sometimes considered as important as the gift itself. In her works, this multi-layered element creates a sense of delicacy, as if what is being carried inside these forms are precious living embryos.
Although these luminous, floaty works seem worlds away from Kusumoto’s metalwork, they still share the ability to evoke a childlike wonder in the viewer. The metalworks beg to be taken apart and explored, and the fiber works scream out to be squashed and stretched, held to the ear and shaken.
To explore more of Kusumoto’s work head over to her website or follow her on Facebook.
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