About “1 : 1”

Amidst full of nature; close to the ocean and the mountains along the gleam of the stars, I grew up in the island of Awaji – and when I was nineteen I came to Tokyo to study fashion. It was while attending fashion school, where I first faced the material “thread.”

Thread appears in various scenes of life. It binds books and through embroidering images can appear anywhere. By knitting or weaving, thread becomes fabric and textile that form the clothes that we wear everyday. I was charmed by such a capacity of “thread.”

For me at the time, Tokyo was not only a place where people, things, and information gather, but also a place full of possibility; a place to occupy the position of creator and express myself. On the very first day I came to Tokyo, I was scouted in Harajuku by chance to be a model for a women’s fashion magazine. It was one of those instances allowing me to express myself.

While modeling I came to be interested in photography as a media. Photography isn’t simply a photographer and the subject – instead I wanted to know how the unconscious mind and the social conditions within the subject’s relation between the exterior and interior affect the result. If commercial photography which fashion magazines show is the “cover,” I became fascinated with the model’s own deep psyche which is hidden in the “back.”

For example, everyone has something about themselves they don’t feel good about. I’m short for a fashion model, so I had to devise every article of clothing by myself. When I appear on the pages of the magazines, even though I may look as though I am completely confident, I hold many internal conflicts. While experiencing such discomfort, I gradually started to feel as though such a complex became my own uniqueness and could be my strength.

After awhile, I began to choose my own clothes, planned the content of the story, and began producing the pages myself. Through photographing models in similar circumstance as myself, I thought about drawing the internal image with embroidery, envisioned from the external appearance. Piercing the photograph with needle; the act of sewing with thread is literally to go back and forth between the surface and the back. This is also similar to the way I turned to be the one to photograph from the position of being photographed.

Through creating dresses that fit the celebrities’ personalities and embroidering the portraits I photograph, the series “Bijo-Saishu” and “Complex” were created.

The recent series “1:1” takes the images saved in my Instagram as the motif. When I look at the photographs I took with my cell phone, I’m reminded of the particular feeling and the image of the place. Perhaps every image has some effect on the world, regardless of what it is. While thinking along those lines, I lightly tread beside the images and the texts to choose them.

There are many perspectives on the communities of social media. The images of the everyday sights that run through it could feel as if they are composed of several layers. In reality, among the overflowing information, both truths and lies are fused and exist together.

From these sentiments, the negative and the positive are reversed, and one of the images is printed on photographic paper, while the other is transferred onto the surface where only the warp threads are lined. The two layers are superimposed on top of each other with slight gap between them. Because of this, depending on the angle of viewing, the negative and the positive images compete in vision and represent my memory and the scenes of my psyche in multiple layers.

Every day, these layers cling to our bodies just like the clothes that hide some kind of essence (the complex), and exist in the shape tailored to each one’s individuality. And it is beautiful because it is complex.

Although the world seems so complicated just one “thread” binds and ties something precious. And the “threads” connect our minds and senses while weaving our memories and spinning our stories.

February 2016