Arts Thread

My recent work developed in response to my family's ancestral Kominka, one of few remaining traditional Japanese houses in the industrialised rural town of Kakogawa. Standing in quiet resistance to its surroundings – a tension echoed through steel and rust elements – I carry a duty to preserve the building and its five generations of gathered life. Using fabrics collected and Boro-mended by my ancestors, otherwise strangers to me, I collaborate with them. The materials I work with hold the tension of opposites: soft ancestral textiles juxtaposed with harsh steel, natural indigo's strengthening properties against corroding orange rust. The repetitive stitching, hammering, and binding is a ritualistic contemplation. As a child of the diaspora, I have struggled with feeling inauthentic, performative, even appropriative in my Japaneseness; I am not a specialised craftsman or calligrapher, yet my intuitive making reflects wabi-sabi and mingei aesthetics, and my rust drawings resemble Shodo calligraphy. The installation was inspired by the Kominka's Tokonoma – a raised alcove reserved for sacred displays, which my childhood imagination thought of as a forbidden theatre stage. It is a place charged with Ma – the charged intervals and negative space found within Japanese architecture and in Noh and Kabuki theatre. For me, Ma overlaps with Bhabha's Third Space and John Cage's definition of silence: the liminal is not static or void, but dense and active with anticipation. A central steel bowl holds a seemingly inanimate indigo shibori creature in water; over time the indigo bleeds orange, encrusting in a cocoon of rust. The audience is held in anticipation, unsuspecting of the performance that is both the creature's metamorphosis and their own wandering.