About Eiko 's work...

Eiko Ishizawa investigates the invisible world, what is hidden by layers of common perception in everyday life. By doing so, her work attempts to assert the fantasy in reality.

Recent sculptures and installations are themed on the romantic concept of exploration, seen in such works as The Cave; The Waterfall; The Great Sleeping Bear; and The Optimism in the Gravity. Creating vivid encounters between audiences and surreal scenery and characters, she sets up and captures the moment where we marvel at nature and the unknown. Allowing us to be the intrepid explorer, she is then able to question our perceptions regarding escapism and discovery, through stimulating yet ambiguous situations.

Ishizawa focuses and translates this into sets of simple polarities - the purity of nature versus the evil of the city, utopia versus harsh urban life, and so on - embracing issues of modern living in her contemporary use of materials and forms. Within this duality hides layers of multiple meanings and experiences to discover, synchronizing feelings of absurdity for contemporary lifestyles, but also an undeniable sentimentality for them too.

This is often explored as a narrative, in which her sculptures and installations could be regarded as props and stage sets at first sight. Context is sometimes defined through the use of specific commodities– a sleeping bag, tents, cables. These recognizable objects – the use of which could well give access to imagined locations and achievable dreams – are manipulated to depict the tension between desire and consequence, security and adventure, the relationship between freedom and destruction.

Relating directly to her considerations of perception, light becomes another central theme. Taking a personal hypothesis on how light creates vision, Ishizawa applies photographic techniques and abstract colorful paper collages in her works The Relationship Between Holes and Reflections and The Optimism in the Gravity. Here two definitions of light become important; one as the physical interaction between light and matter, the other as light of an inner, spiritual sense, a positive energy. Light therefore becomes a metaphor for both illusion and reality itself.

Through combining these conceptual balances with original methods of presentation, Ishizawa establishes relationships between her audience and her works through sensory and psychological journeys. Presenting us with fantastical suggestions she asks us to consider other ways of perceiving reality, giving us the opportunity to discover how we might react to such exploration.