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Kei
Takemura
OPENING 22.10.2004,
6pm
23.10. - 04.12.2004
With
her first solo show in Europe, the young Japanese artist Kei Takemura
presents a series of works that she has created over the last two
years which have been produced in Tokyo and Berlin. Both places
inspire her and serve her as patterns for her partly large size
embroidery pieces. Kei Takemura uses white shiny silk threads from
Japan to embroider semi-transparent cloths in a Japanese embroidery
technique for which she chooses motifs from these environments.
These motifs are captured for a long time - silk is supposed to
last a minimum of 1000 years. She also dedicates a lot of time
capturing memory as in her piece "To Remember Grandmother’s
House Better", 2004. Using her own memory and the memories
of her family members she made a life size sketch of the former
tea house in which her grandmother used to live during her last
years. This building which no longer exists is now transferred
in outlines on the wall in the gallery (450 x 290 cm) covered by
a half transparent cloth with silk thread embroidery. The objects
that surrounded the grandmother in her living room are tenderly
recognizable on the fabric. This
lengthy process unites Takemura’s memories with the memories of her family
and appears as a pale imagination of a vanished house.
In her series of works, "Restoration", Kei Takemura attaches broken
everyday dishes together and covers them with half transparent cloth. The points
of fracture of the plates, cups, pots and glasses are transferred with white
silk threads exactly into the fabric. Through the “wounds” of accidental
fragmentation, the broken dish did not land in the dustbin, rather, Kei Takemura
reinstates
the objects’ validity through the embroided “bandage”. The
embroidery of Kei Takemura captures ephemerality and often also that which is
out of our
field of vision, minor details like spots on the wall in the staircase,
scraps of wallpaper from a former inhabitant of her apartment in Berlin. Kei
Takemura takes pleasure out of small inconspicuous details and creates her original
poetry of everyday life.
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