Asako Shiroki - The wind blows in Friday 18 March – Monday 16 May 2022
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent’s Park), London NW1 4QP Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Asako Shiroki’s work appears enigmatically stark in its practical forms and untreated materials. Perhaps confounding at first glance reveals a certain rhythm through repetition and extension over time. An object’s tempo often seems to be based on an alternative standard, as if an anamorphic perspective or viewed from an alternative dimension to the world we live in. Its presence is gentle, co-existing in our environment, invoking familiar forms. Yet, in this distorted familiarity lies a disruption of human scales of thinking, evoking a recollection of fragmented memories. Trained initially in silversmithing, Shiroki moved on to working in wood. She describes this natural material as simultaneously confrontational, adaptable, and a means to explore the temporal process of bringing form to raw material. The performative act of working the wood crystallises in the exhibition space as an installation, choreographed in physical relationships, balance, and tensions between shapes. Shiroki respects the ephemeral nature of reality and how metamorphosis occurs in our environment; she reflects fragility and strength through her practice. Henceforth her works can be dismantled to lie dormant until they are ready to be re-assembled. One day I was walking on the street, and I found the shapes of the twigs charming. As I had one of them in my hand, I spotted a bird’s nest over my head. It was a moment of intervention in the process of rational collection or destined accumulation, and it was a moment of discovering passages and the interweaving of different worlds. The pleasing shape of the twig was the connection between autonomous existences. I felt that our human lives co-exist with many other world layers. The wind blows in; her first UK solo show at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation features the work A twig of interweaving passages, initially commissioned by Schmuck2 in Retschow. Shiroki’s first work shown in public space signalled a new dimension to her practice. Collecting found ephemeral objects from her surroundings – pretzels, feathers, twigs – transformed in bronze, her work allows intervention from nature but reflects it into an inverse perspective on the world. Requisitioning elements of the constructed environment, the installation develops the artist’s acute sensibility for materials and explores the tension between nature and dwelling. Her work equips nature, an arbitrary set of standards, recognition, histories, technique or our embedded culture with our perceptions.
On the right page (Work in the foreground ) Mirror reflecting the wind, 2022, W150 × D34 × H665 cm, Wood, silk, flint (Work at the window side) Your voice, echoed, 2022, W15.5 × D35 × H2 cm, Wood, mirror, feather, chain, glaze (Work at the back) Singing double birds, 2019, W97 × D49 × H189 cm, Wood, chain, feather
A twig of interweaving passages, 2021, W470 × D/H variable cm, Blood beech tree, wind, birds singing, wood, glass, silver chain, brass, leather, bronze casting of a twig that fallen in front of me.
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