Philadelphia Introductions: Nami Yamamoto

Nami Yamamoto, installation view of MIniature Gardens

Philadelphia Introductions:
Nami Yamamoto

by
Andrea Kirsh

March 22, 2007

Nami Yamamoto loves the patterns of nature, and she has reproduced and abstracted them to create installations of beauty and delight. She makes extensive empirical studies and prizes a copy of On Growth and Form (1917) by the polymath scholar, Darcy Wentworth Thompson (which Yamamoto has in Japanese translation). Thompson attempted to show that natural growth is more a function of mathematics than of natural selection. While Yamamoto’s work is not systematic like the scientist’s nor is it driven by a theoretical position, she shares Thompson’s concern with order as well as his underlying attraction to the aesthetics of biological growth.

In Japan she was trained as a painter and all of her earlier paintings employed the ordering structure of a grid. Their forms, however were soft-edged and organic; some patterns were actually based on the way seeds are arranged in pine-cones and sunflowers, others on honey-combs. Much of the work consisted of all-over patterning and layering which seemed to derive from textiles, or at least to involve a thinking similar to textile design; the colors played off one another as in tapestry. She worked in encaustic, which yields a soft, waxy sheen that draws attention to its surface. In more recent paintings she makes patterns with small, round stickers which protrude as slight bumps on the canvas. Her interest in the physicality of the paintings lead Yamamoto to working beyond two dimensions, and she turned to the floor.

She began a series of installations consisting of arrangements of hundreds of small pieces of paper, each marked with a stamp. The initial installation was laid out on her studio floor in a tightly-packed, radiating pattern much like the petals of a huge chrysanthemum. Because the pieces of paper were not affixed, they became dislodged as people walked in and out of the studio and Yamamoto recorded the installation’s progressive dissolution. She then experimented with arrangements of small, three-dimensional paper constructions and with pieces of paper affixed to the wall with pins. She became concerned that her use of paper would be associated too much with Japanese traditions and that would be limiting, so she turned to various plastics and synthetics.

In 2001 Yamamoto began a series of installations that continues to evolve: Primordial Soup. Each iteration of Soup is constructed of many small units cut from vinyl in varied colors (usually in a bright and clear palette). She distributes them across multiple walls around a room and they are set slightly away from the walls on pins, so their cast shadows become an active part of the work. The forms are derived from scientific studies of soap bubbles, although the artist also associates them with architectural plans. Some are single bubbles, others have two lobes or more and some of them appear to rise through the surface where they meet the walls. The effect is rather like walking into one of her earlier paintings, except the patterning is less dense and clearly-structured. The small, colored units resemble an abstract language or a series of diacritical marks, and the bubble-forms give them an inherent buoyancy and playfulness. She has experimented with varied size units and with massing them more tightly; the pins allow her to set them in slightly different planes so they overlap. One of the versions was less an installation than a narrow, sculptural relief which spilled from the wall onto the floor.

She experimented with other uses of walls in Water Field (2006) which extended over three sides of a room at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. The installation represented water seen from above, through clouds; and here Yamamoto began to play with a tension between figure and ground that would continue into her subsequent work. The water was created from gouache on colored paper, pasted to the wall; the painted waves were derived from Japanese prints, although she is interested in other representations of moving water, notably Leonardo’s. The larger mass of the clouds was bare wall, and even though the puffy forms read as clouds they also defined themselves as wall and, hence, background to the narrow bits of blue water. As one looked at it the figure and ground continued to switch.

The next series grew out of Yamamoto’s life-long tendency to collect things, mostly fairly diminutive, that catch her visual fancy: all sorts of shells, rocks, seeds and pods as well as man-made objects of every kind, from small decorative objects and toys to unknown bits of hardware. The shelves of her home and studio are filled with the material, all arranged with the artist’s particular eye. So she made table display-cases of pale wood and filled them with articles from her collection, some juxtaposed for formal reasons, others because of their functions.

She was interested in something at one remove from these cases of objects and began to abstract them by substituting silhouettes of each article which she cut from variously-colored origami paper. These became Miniature Gardens: a group of table cases (all stand 36" and they are variously 24"x24", 24" x 36", or 36" x 48"), each filled with a different array of silhouettes; these are laid out, but not affixed, to linen which is sometimes white, other times brown or black. The cases are filled and the silhouettes grouped with great regularity, recalling the grids Yamamoto used to structure her paintings. In the earliest Gardens the forms are brightly-colored and reflect the full spectrum of the origami paper’s colors. In the most sophisticated of the Gardens she restricts the palette and the grid breaks down but is replaced by a sensitivity to the spaces around the silhouettes; the placement is calibrated so that the background has equal weight to the cut-out figures, giving these arrangements an equal stability, although of a different sort. They don’t exactly shift between figure and ground, but the ground assumes a delicate balance in relation to the mass of the figures.

The Miniature Gardens appeal on various levels. Yamamoto is so skilled with the knife that one can say she draws with it, and her line is lithe and minutely-detailed. She selects many objects with intricate patterns and profiles, and the first appeal is in the artist’s virtuosic skill with her knife and eye. The second is in the variety of the forms, the same variety that obviously attracts the artist: for there is the organic irregularity of a dried bit of foliage next to the crisp precision of a plastic spatula, the simple but imperfect ovoid of a rock next to the intricacy of a small woven basket, the three-lobed body of a large insect beside a small, unidentifiable object, too regular to be natural. And here is the third level of appeal: the challenge of identifying the things from their outlines. It is rather like a game: what is it? oh, yes, a thing-a-ma-bob, but what is it called? At a fourth level, we enjoy the order she brings to the diverse silhouettes and the patterns they form within the regular borders of the cases.

Miniature Gardens bear comparison with the work of a number of other artists who assembled collections, beginning with Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing (1965-77), although Yamamoto’s collection shares neither Oldenburg’s irony nor the transformative playfulness of his detritus/ray guns. The Gardens share aspects of Karsten Bott’s Archive of Contemporary History (from the late 1980's on). Although Yamamoto is not interested in Bott’s attempts at classification, his commentary on archaeological and/or museological practice nor his absurdity of scale, she shares his pleasure in the mundane. In this (and in her palette) the Gardens also resemble Charles and Ray Eames’ cards decorated with arrays of dime-store objects.

Finally, the Gardens remind me of the everyday objects (from car mufflers, electric irons and macaroni, to plastic containers of fruit) used as motifs within the geometric backgrounds of the wonderful, wax-printed fabrics favored in West Africa. Yamamoto shares their indiscriminate pleasure in the man-made as well as the natural world and their affirmation that anything can be used to construct beautiful patterns. The final level on which Yamamoto’s Gardens appeal is surely her reminder to appreciate the variety of our visual surroundings, from the simplest and least consequential to the most profound and complex.

Back to InLiquid's Commentary section index