..."Soil also plays a role in the work of Kazuhito Takadoi, whose fascination with British landscape and gardens originally drew him to the UK to study horticulture at RHS Garden, Wisley, having studied at Japan's Hokkaido University Faculty of Agriculture in Sapporo. His sculptures blend elements from the plants he collects from a nearby organic farm -twigs and grasses are woven using the traditional crafts of basketry, embroidery and gold leafing, "making it contemporary in a vey beautiful way" says Andrea Harari of Marylebone's jaggedart gallery, which shows Takadoi's work. The methods are painstaking and intricate: in Rinkaku series, blades of green grass -which fade with time - are meticulously stitched over circles of gold leaf to create organic forms overlapped by embroidered circles of Sumi ink-dyed string. "Anyone would be able to see that the creator is Japanese", says Harari. "It comes across immediately. The work is very quiet and all about time - the time for the grass to grow, and then the time it takes to eventually change. That is something very Japanese". Takadoi enjoys the artistic freedom he has in the UK to follow his own path and to experiment with new materials and techniques. But he talks of the links to Japanese tradition which for him has two principles: less is more and avoiding symmetry - which he combines with abstraction from western art.....
October 23, 2018