Ayako Saito: Folding Space The second interview in a three-part series about Japanese-born artists working in Sydney, Australia
Ayako Saito with her sculpture 'Heaven's Door' (2018). Painted steel, 80 x 200 x 400 cm. (Photograph: Michael Zanetti)
I came to know Ayako at the National Art School in Sydney, where she was welding in the workshop and I was studying at the time. She has an impressive reputation for her large, outdoor steel sculptures and public commissions around Sydney. Brightly monochromatic, geometric, and multi-faceted, these works feature planes and curves that have bisected many iconic views of the city’s coastal landscape and buildings. On the October afternoon I meet with her online, she is wearing red and is on the move, making tea and carrying her phone as she sits down to talk. Quite often, she steers the interview, which is supposed to be about her, to ask her own questions about me. She uses her hands a lot while talking – they flutter, gesture, and slice through the air. I think of how they resemble the precise and dynamic forms of her sculptures.