April 6 – 29, 2007
Yukie Kobayashi and Elsabé Dixon – Kumo Cloud Wolk
Member artist Yukie Yobayashi has collaborated with artist Elsabé Dixon to create Kumo Cloud Wolk, an installation comprised of hand made paper and silk weavings.
Born in Japan, Yukie Kobayashi has been intimately engaged in the process of papermaking: dehydrating bark fiber, cooking it, beating it into pulp, and making the large scale sheets of paper from that pulp. She is particularly interested in the arbitrary direction the fibers take when suspended in water during the process of forming a sheet of hand made paper. The translucency of the fiber and the movement of the water has inspired her artwork and reminds her of the way clouds float in the sky.
Born in South Africa, Elsabé Dixon raised silkworms as a child. A descendent of French Huguenots who brought sericulture to South Africa, she has been fascinated with the silk making process and has utilized the forms as well as the silk created by the silkworms from an early age. Her worms spin silk weavings onto structures she provides and she documents, through microscopic views, the weaving pattern of each silkworm. Her observations when looking at the silk-threaded pathway of each silkworm, allows her to simulate the process of the silkworm weaving a cocoon form. Multiplied applications of the process are similar to how particles of water form a cloud, through accumulation and growth in mass and dimension.
In Japanese the word for cloud is Kumo. In Afrikaans (the language of South Africa) it is Wolk. A cloud in the sky can be seen as a metaphor for the immigration experiences of both Yukie Kobayashi and Elsabé Dixon. Invisible microscopic water anywhere in the world can form a cloud. The cloud reflects the color of the atmosphere. It keeps changing form and travels through the world on the wind. The abstract nature of clouds is that they have no cultural boundary, but have their own origin and history. In this collaboration, the concept is fluid, ever changing, and represents all things that we cannot comprehend as well as possibilities of constant movement.