of a swimming polar bear Byaku
As a part of my arts award I was going to write a review of an exibition. Unfortunately because of COVID-19 I can’t go to an exibition so I’m going to look at the work of an artist who has an exibition online. The artist is Nahoko Kojima, who makes sculptures out of paper. I chose her because she makes sculptures of animals and I really like animals.
Nahoko Kojima is Japanese and paper cutting has a long tradition in Japan. It originally came from China. Paper was invented in China in 105AD and decorative paper cutting started in the 4th century AD. It spread to Japan in the 7th century AD where it is called kirie, which means ‘cut picture’.
Nahoko Kojima was born in 1981 and was taught papercutting from the age of five years old. She did a degree in design and became a graphic designer. Then she moved to London in 2005. Her work then began to appear in exhibitions. She has had many solo exhibtions and in 2016 she won the Kuwasawa Award, which is for Japanese who have made a big contibution to their art. She still lives in London.
Each of her works takes months to make. First, she thinks of an idea, like a life-sized crocodile or blue whale. Then she draws the design on a single piece of washi paper. She colours in the part of the drawing that she is going to cut out and then cuts the pieces out with a sharp knife. She has to change the blade of the knife every two or three mintues to make sure it is sharp. After this, she fixes nylon threads to the cut out and hangs it from the ceiling. Finally, she hangs lamps it up to light it and project shadows. This is an unusual technique because traditonally paper cuts are flat and hang on the wall like a picture.
Her work is mostly of animals. “I love nature, animals and things that have life,” she says. For example Sumi (2019), is a 8.5m long cut out of a life sized crocodile, and Byaku (2014), is a swimming polar bear.
I like her work because it takes a lot of drawing and designing skills. It also takes a lot of patience (which I don’t have). I like the atmosphere, the shadows and the light. I also like the patterns within the animals because I find that the interior patterns express the animal in some way e.g. the crocodile has scale like patterns which carves intricate shadows below it. I have learned from this that you can’t pull off something incredible without working hard.