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Naomi Ota and Mami Yamanaka
Compiled for the exhibition, "Silence Descends"
Gabriel Gallery
Footscray Community Arts Centre
4th-28th April 2002
When memories are recalled and/or re-confirmed, all sorts of sensuous elements are involved. Impressions seem to be reconstructed as the sense of touch, temperature etc, or as perceptions which complicate those senses, and they are stored within our memory. We search these stores, keen to examine fragments of recollections and use our imagination when we encounter incidents.
However, I sometimes encounter something that I feel so familiar and seem to carry an enormous understanding of. It’s not stored in my memories, but I can intuitively accept it without confirmation or definition. All my activated senses amplify some kinds of primary images. Culture, which is cultivated during the passage of a tremendous amount of time, might be gifted into everyone's memory store when we're born.
It is like adorning the emptiness of space. These meetings, impressions or pain cannot be captured, held or translated into forms or words. However, it 'exists' more than anything. It is extraordinarily ambiguous and yet certain at the same time. This is one of the areas in which I think art plays its greatest role- devoting its energy to amplifying these primary images. I would like to look at each of these precious elements carefully and quietly.
Naomi Ota
Naomi Ota is a fibre installation
artist and lecturer in Visual Art at the School of Creative Arts, University
of Melbourne. Her work is a complex cross over between textiles and fine
art. Her understanding of culture as a native Japanese (person) and her
international experience as a professional artist have both contributed
a unique cultural context to the discipline. Ota's work has been extensively
exhibited nationally and internationally.
My main conceptual aim in art making is the exploration of my original patterns. These patterns represent many aspects of myself. It is almost like my inner self-portrait. These aspects of myself are often very personal experiences of the intimate relationships with surrounding people/environment and myself.
However, this personal experience is juxtaposed onto my social experience, a reflection of who I am in the society. My art making aims to express these 'daily/domestic' existences of myself, developing my own culture, as well as expressing my own interpretation of the concept of 'Family', which I believe to be many people, is the 'core' experience defining how you relate with society.
Within the space, I gather the images of these domestic experiences of mine, and reconstruct them into my work. I would like it to contain the feeling of both a celebration and abhorrence of the 'Family', which is often the case in close relationships. And hopefully I could sublimate this subjective feeling to an objective condition in which the viewer could understand and reflect on their own experience of and from it.
Mami Yamanaka
Mami Yamanaka migrated to
Australia from Japan in 1994. In Japan, she worked as a writer/editor and
interior space designer, as well as exhibiting art. In Australia, she studied
Fine Art Painting at RMIT University, and is currently undertaking a Master
of Art by Research Painting course at RMIT with an Australian Postgraduate
Award. She has exhibited her work in Japan and Australia, in many different
forms.
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