NAOKO TAGAI

Cluster Crafts Exhibitor | 2024

Naoko works with a diverse variety of media including glass, ceramic sculpture, photography, drawing, painting and printmaking. The work she produces reflects her enduring interest and fascination with moments in nature. Naoko has a deep curiosity about time, and the apparent paradox where, by its very nature time passes fleetingly, yet contained within each and every moment is everything. In any given moment the past, present and future are united; so too are decay and regeneration, the natural and the constructed.

For Naoko, within her practice, there is a transcendental space to be found, where the simultaneous states of wholeness and emptiness can be revealed, explored, played with. Implicitly and threaded throughout each aspect of her diverse practice, there contains this spiritual inquiry, an inquiry that goes to the very heart of what it means to be human.

Naoko Tagai was born in Kyoto, Japan. Naoko is currently based in Deptford, London. Naoko believes that an artist’s creativity is an extremely sensitive and dynamic process that taps directly into the unconscious. By bringing awareness to each of the senses - sight, smell, sound, touch and taste, the artist can then animate this material. Translating it into form, an artists output may evoke similar journeys within the viewer, but who ultimately bring their own histories and interpretations to what they see.

The work Naoko makes can be understood as the synthesis of her feelings, unconscious, five senses, with the material of the work itself. Each work contains its own visual language, its own unique history. Each finished piece, can therefore be read as a document of this process, each mark or movement, a part of that particular story.

A MOMENT OF HARMONY SERIES

This series of porcelain wall sculpture is a hand-build porcelain wall sculpture. This installation evokes a moment of harmony where butterflies are gliding around the plants and nature is in perfect harmony. I decided to explore the potential of Porcelain to create a form of sculpture - an imaginary plant that seek to express the overwhelming energy and power of nature to prevail in the world, despite the odds. The hard sharp spikes, thorns, tentacles and tendrils in the work point towards this strength and resilience, which act as a form of intuitive life force for the plant - a means of survival.

For me porcelain is the perfect material to represent the idea of fragility, strength, vitality and the power of transformation of people and nature itself. In this installation I wanted to capture life force, the vitality yet fragility of nature and people naturally exhibit - something indeed we can learn much from, both as a species and as individual people.