In this post, I thought I would share some of my past work. Specifically from when I was in university studying printmaking and the few years after graduating until I left and moved to Japan.
I studied at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and majored in fine art - printmaking. Specifically, I'm gonna talk about my final undergraduate year in 2011 and other important shows after graduating.
Back in the day (10 odd years ago), my work was (and still is) about being half Japanese and Australian. Hybridized and consisting of multiple elements. So I combined different landscapes, creatures, photographic and non-photographic, violent and calm imagery; and even combining different printing techniques. So pretty much everything was, in some way, hybridized.
For example, this piece I did in the first semester of my last year at university is made up of three panels. The imagery I used is from old master ukiyo-e woodblock artists, such as Hokusai, and combining them with photographic landscapes. One of these landscapes is a sunset taken from Mars! The creatures are parts of different animals that have also been collaged together, and I've also combined different printing techniques. The majority of these prints have been created on Photoshop, and then I've printed over the top using a very light wood grain texture. Sorry, it's a bit hard to see in the photos below!
Just to take a step further, I made a massive 15 panel amalgamation that was made up of the two pieces above plus another similar piece and a bunch of other panels I had lying around.
As you can see, I combined just about everything here! Different techniques, animals, landscapes!
This last piece was the winner of the graduate prize, which was a solo exhibition at
Firestation Print Studio Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
This show happened in early 2012, right after my graduation, so I didn't have enough time to make a whole new body of work, so I just recycled most of my prints I made in my third year. But I did make a cool little digital collage, you can see on the right. This is called "Hidesato's Mortal Enemy the Centipede", and is based on an old Japanese story called "The Tale of Tawara Toda" (俵藤太物語); which is about the hero, Fujiwara no Hidesato's quest to kill the giant centipede that lives in the mountains near Lake Biwa.
Later that same year, I was invited to participate in a print exchange called Beautiful Soup and was curated by Rona Green. There were 56 artists altogether, and we all made 57 prints. Every artist would get one print of every other artist and the extra print was for the exhibition we had at The Abbotsford Convent Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
My last exhibition before I moved to Japan was called "It's Not a Myth" at Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The name of the show was kinda a play on words, as the work I showed was all about Japanese mythology, but also how Australian animals were thought to be mythical, imaginary or even a hoax when they were first discovered by the first explorers to land on Australian soil. An example of this is the Platypus: early European explorers thought that it was a hoax, thinking that someone had made the animal out of other parts of animals - a duck's bill and legs, a mouse or rat's body, a beaver's tail etc.
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