NATSUKO UCHINO
Name: Natsuko Uchino
Age: 40
Birthplace: Kumamoto, Japan
Home: Belvézet, France
Discipline: Art
Untitled white vase with handles, 2021
What are the main topics you deal with in your practice?
Containers, display, space, sustenance, ecology, our relationship to production, matter and placeness. Habitat, modes of inhabiting, patina, touch, processes, alchemy and metamorphosis.
How do you define your artistic research in three words?
Vernacular crafts, geo/bio sourcing.
What images and spaces do you want to create through your work?
I was very much inspired by the counter-narrative proposed by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. This reading was a good reminder as to how the baseline of art as a proposition should somehow contribute to expanding the possibilities of imagining. The metaphor of the container as the space of exhibition functions in both giving context and memories of paths threaded. The elements composing my works function in relation to each other, there’s a modality with which forms are displayed that reflects on ecology.
Where and how do you find poetry?
In all various processes of transformation, in the gestures with which we touch the world and how the world touches you back.
In your view, what does being an artist mean in today’s world?
To subscribe and participate in other forms of making and being than that of consumption.
Adobe Lunaria, 2023, clay, sand, straw, coco fiber, plant material
Adobe Laurel, 2023, clay, sand, straw, coco fiber, plant material and ceramic shard
Adobe Lychen, 2023, clay, sand, straw, coco fiber, plant material
Adobe Brussels Mussels, 2023, clay, sand, straw, coco fiber, plant material and shells