Sitting the gallery as I have just found out today, is a very good way to work on my Japanese. Not a lot of people in Japan speak English, so I’ve become very good at gestures and using the few words I do know. When I knew I was coming to Japan, I signed up for a beginners course at the Canadian Japanese Cultural Centre in Montreal. I was away for an exhibition in Bogota and missed one lesson near the beginning unfortunately and then another because of illness, so I never really felt like I was able to keep […]

The race is on. Which will be ready first – the gallery or my work? Little more than 2 and a half months ago, it was decided that a gallery would be built and that I would make its first exhibition. In one week today, it all begins. Here are some photos of where we are today. We both feel that everything is completely on schedule. The garage is now a beautiful, white space and  I am once again, making art on the kitchen table – still the best place for mixing stuff up. Monday, the windows and the doors […]

There is definitely something special going on about feet here. Everyone removes their shoes before entering their home. That is a given and I understand it. No problem. There are special slippers to put on for the toilet and at the onsen or public bath it is barefeet only, entirely naked only in fact. So, it would appear that you have to make at least a few social blunders in Japan. Mine concerned my first encounter with toilet slippers. It happened in a small family restaurant in Hakone, near Mount Fuji. When you first walk into a restaurant, or public […]

Yayoi Kusama is a well-known and loved Japanese artist. Her work has been exhibited around the world and the dot continues to be a central theme. As far as the ubiquitous polka-dot and Yayoi Kusama’s dot obsession, it is one of those chicken or egg coming first questions. You can’t deny that there are really a lot of polka-dots in Japan. Once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere. The water drop or mizu tama in Japanese is the origin of the pattern here. I have always loved polka-dots. To me they say, let’s have fun, clothes don’t have […]

Kamikoya is also a Bed & Breakfast, with lunch and dinner available if requested. With few other options and the nearest store several kilometres away, I chose the food-included plan. For three days, I was treated to Chikako Uitenboogaart’s cooking. Chikako specializes in spring greens and organic vegetables from her own garden and or picked from the wild. Each meal was a surprise and a beauty for both eyes and stomach. Yohei Uitenboogaart is the manager, looking after finances, the website, driving visitors to and from Kamikoya and all the other details that never quite get written down in a […]

The prospect of a solo exhibition in May completely changed the focus of my art making from a research mode to a production mode. I knew that I wanted to show work using paper and that I was considering presenting one of my poems translated into Japanese and cast in paper. In early March, I went to Hanno, a small town approximately one hour north west of Tokyo to visit the paper making studio of sculptor, Yanai Tsuguo. http://www.yaezakidokudami.com/yanai.html  Realizing that it was going to be difficult to find cotton fibres, my customary fibre of choice for casting and after […]

There have been so many unexpected, special encounters with people here, leading me from one person to the next and from one surprising discovery to another. “Ichi-go ichi-e,” I can’t remember if it was Yohei or Chikako at Kamikoya who first mentioned this age-old saying from Zen Buddhism and the tea ceremony to me. Translated, it means,  this chance meeting of a lifetime – a moment to be treasured and taken advantage of, because it may never happen again. Most of what I know about papermaking I’ve learned through  trial and error, reading and a weekend course in paper casting […]

I flew from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Kochi, heading to Kamikoya, where I had scheduled a three-day private course in Japanese papermaking. I had decided to spend one night in Kochi in order to visit the Ino Paper Museum. To get to Ino, a small town on the outskirts of Kochi, I took what looked like a tram car straight out of the 1950’s – a startling contrast to Tokyo, where nothing seems to be more than 10 years old! The ride takes about 30 minutes and you get off at the last stop, walk to the end of the […]

For several years now, as part of my artmaking process, I have been spinning dictionary papers into threads. One of the traditional Japanese crafts that I wanted to learn while in Tokyo was shifu- turning paper into thread. This is definitely an art that has almost disappeared in Japan and presently, shifu is practiced by few. Historically, fibres such as hemp, flax and ramie were used for weaving everyday clothes; there were no sheep for making wool, cotton was not a indigenous plant and silk was reserved for the upper class and nobility. In areas were there were not enough […]

I’ve gotten quite far behind with my news in this blog. Over a month ago now, quite out of the blue, I was offered an exhibition in a brand new gallery (still under construction in fact). The proposal came as a result of a presentation of my work that I gave at the gallery Higure, at the invitation of Masashi Ogura. Ogura-san is a curator and visits Montreal almost every summer.  Nicole Gingras suggested we contact each other. Even though I had no work here with me and I had no idea what I would show, this was an offer […]