Mika Horie @ IBASHO

Mika Horie: Trees, Water and Light
29 February until 13 March

“After the snow melts in spring, Horie drives up narrow winding roads into the mountains to fill her Land Rover with gampi branches — the raw material to make traditional paper. Horie processes the gampi fibers fully by hand into delicate-looking but sturdy paper, which is the material on which she prints cyanotype images of the landscapes, foliage, nearly-forgotten villages and objects in or around her home.

Horie treats her paper with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, places the negatives directly on top of the paper and allows the sun to expose them to shades of cyan and deep indigo. She then washes the paper with spring water to fixate the image and lets the art work dry in the wind.

Horie’s prints are all different, unique, even when they show the same image, because of the handmade paper and the ever-changing sunlight. Each print has a different texture, some blurry parts and a large variety of tones of blue.

Her work is infused with wabi sabi. Wabi sabi is the Japanese aesthetic concept that is generally described as ‘a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. A beauty of things modest and humble. A beauty of things unconventional.’”

IBASHO
Antwerp, Belgium

Originally published at Blog — F-Stop Magazine.