luminescence: Installation and Photography by Yukako Shibata

“Yukako Shibata’s objects seep in from the boundaries of a space, slowly penetrating the consciousness. And like the light that filters into an enclosed clearing, they are often made to irradiate, or create the illusion of doing so, thereby seeming to demarcate space through light.”

– Kamini Vellodi (artist/ writer/ researcher)

The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition of installation and photography by Yukako Shibata.

Shibata’s work shares a common vocabulary, which is essentially minimal, of objects that are touched with a Japanese aesthetic of subtlety and simplicity in colour and shape. This aesthetic emphasises suggestion rather than insistence, also latency and the use of empty space and quietness. The texture qualities of lacquerware are evident, as is the practice of paying as much attention to invisible, hidden areas of an object as to the visible surfaces.

In her work, Shibata explores the fugitive colours of the natural world and questions the complex interplay of light, atmosphere and the human perceptual system. Finding the inner light in all things mundane inspires her, and it is these moments of reverie that are embodied in the work. Each of her works is a journey of discovery through play and observation, where the destination remains open. She deals with the microcosm in order to gain access to the universal that exists both within and around it.

In this exhibition, she dedicates one room solely to site installation, with painted wall-based objects creating clusters in the space. In the other room, she will display photographs of the objects taken in a variety of outdoor settings, as if to return the objects to the natural world that first inspired them.

The exhibition rooms are in a Regency townhouse overlooking Regents Park, which are in themselves past expressions of how the natural world was perceived and interpreted.

 “My intention is for viewers to experience my objects as meditative entities which can stimulate memory, and which embody qualities of being precious, desirable and seductive.”

– Yukako Shibata

Yukako Shibata (b. 1972) was born in Hokkaido, Japan. She completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2005, during which she was awarded an Artist Residency in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 2003. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and has had solo shows at the Light contemporary, London (2006) and the Atrium Gallery, London (2006). Shibata lives and works in London.