IBASHO is delighted to present ‘Visual Poetry from Ishikawa’, a solo exhibition of a Japanese photographer Yumiko Izu.
Yumiko Izu was born in Osaka, Japan, where she studied at Visual Arts School, before moving to California to continue her education at the Brooks Institute of Photography. In 1998, she relocated to New York to pursue her career, starting in editorial photography before transitioning to fine art. There, she mastered the delicate art of large-format photography, using 8×10 and 11×14 inch cameras, and perfected the timeless platinum/palladium printing process. Her work captures the yin and yang of life, focusing on fleeting life cycles of flowers and animals.
In the exhibition ‘Visual Poetry from Ishikawa’, Yumiko Izu presents works from the series ‘Utsuroi’. In Japanese, utsuroi refers to the gradual, inevitable transformation from one state to another, suggesting that nothing is permanent and everything is ephemeral. Izu created the ‘Utsuroi’ series between spring and autumn of 2020, reflecting the internal and external states she experienced during the height of the pandemic while living in upstate New York.
Loneliness led her inward, forcing her to face herself. She found solace by a lake, watching water lilies bloom briefly, close against the harsh sun, and slowly disappear with the autumn chill. Yet beneath winter’s frost, their roots endured, waiting for spring’s warmth to rise again. In this quiet cycle, the artist felt the flow of life and the resilience in life.
Compelled by this quiet persistence, Izu began collecting flowers and lily pads to capture their fleeting beauty in the darkroom. Using a camera-less photogram technique, she placed the subjects directly on large-format film, approximately 14 x 20 inches, and created the images through multiple exposures with various types of light. The resulting soft lines blur and bleed in a unique way, almost as though they’ve been drawn with light.
For Yumiko, the process felt like a prayer, a meditation. The final images reflect how her heart transformed through the series and the tranquility she found. She continues the Utsuroi series while living in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan.
The exhibition ‘Visual Poetry from Ishikawa’ will be held from 16 November 2024, to 12 January 2025. The artist will be present at the opening on Saturday 16 November.