KAYOKOYUKI

Emi Otaguro weaves peculiar narratives out of mass-produced goods common in everyday life, such as chewing gums, tablecloths, and galvanized sheets. Though seemingly inhuman and anonymous today, they were originally invented by hand as "devices" to meet certain needs in particular human situations. Utilizing their potentially diverse functions or extracting their essential characteristics with additional drawings or other manipulations, Otaguro converts them into artworks. On the other hand, she also uses organic materials, such as quail egg shell for her collages. "Printed" with the mother bird's internal pigments just before the egg is laid, and considered as a signature feature like human fingerprints because one quail can create only a certain composition, each speckled pattern functions as a camouflage to protect the egg from enemies. Interpreting it as "a landscape painting painted by each quail to reflect their external environment," she smashes quail egg shells into fragments and composes them to create new beings.

"The essential value of those supposedly inorganic objects stays the same over time. The way they exist in fact holds an encompassing nature just like those quail egg patterns," says the artist. This statement proves how the artist carefully chooses her materials that can function as imaginative vehicles to somehow connect formless and boundless complications we embrace inside us to the outside world.

In this exhibition, which marks her first solo show, the artist presents three different approaches at once - new works made with galvanized sheets, an ongoing series with chewing gums that she has worked since 2008, and collages with quail egg shell fragments. Those works open up a variety of narratives that have possibilities to gently touch upon the underlying bases of our existence.