SPIRIT CLOTHS

Fine art prints and environmental traces on cotton, 70 x 110 cm, 2019.
Photographs of the cloths in their respective contexts, fine art prints, 84.1 x 59.4 cm each, 2019-2021.

“Spirit Cloths” is a series of experimental contextual paintings. The paintings are conceived as a medium for recording that registers traces between the field and the archive, between then and now, between real places and imaginary beings. They are based on scans of Yokai spirit scrolls from the Edo period that are housed in the archives of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). The scans were not made of the figured representations but of the drawing scrolls’ peripheral regions not featuring an image. As such, the materiality of the traces left over centuries on the background of the imaginary pictorial space of visions of ghosts comes to the fore. These archival traces were then printed on white cotton fabric (the material used in legends to fashion the robes of female ghosts) and then exposed for an extended period of time to the influences of various ghostly locations. As a result, the imaginary historical pictorial space coincides with the tangible contemporary urban space on the same medium.