Known for her dedicated use of organic materials, in “form is emptiness/emptiness is form,” Sono Kuwayama utilizes handmade paints with natural earth pigments and plant pigments, encaustic beeswax, handspun plant dyed yarn, and handmade textile twine to create canvases that bridge the natural world and the interior world.  As she says, “Sometimes colors speak, sometimes forms speak….listening into the void.”

 

The works are squares whose luminous surfaces flow over the edges with organic abandon.  They are hung in sequences of two across and four- canvas grids, with bands of white wall showing between, or scattered across space, the squares spinning, wind-blown. A Kuwayama painting, then, is an individual canvas but also an aggregation. The canvases converse via continued or almost continued lines and shapes, so that abstractions allude to forms -- is that sun rising? is that peach ripe? Some canvases are literally connected by naturally hanging twine or yarn, handspun by the artist, that make it all the way to the yarn ball on the floor. Or is it the other way around, the yarn ball unspooling to connect the canvases.

​

Around the paintings’ edges or through the interior, words float. The show was inspired by Kuwayama’s recent trek along The Narrow Path into the Interior, the route that Japan’s national poet, Bashō, undertook in 1692. Her companion, poet Bob Holman, composed over a hundred haikus on the walk, some of which are incorporated in the paintings.  Kuwayama investigates how colour and form engage with poetry, how colours and forms could themselves become poetic forms.

 

The Narrow Path into the Interior incorporates both the wilderness of Northern Japan and a walk into one’s own interior world. That duality inspired “form is emptiness/emptiness is form.” Kuwayama has created an audio composition for her show that includes the natural soundscapes of the walk with Holman’s reading of haiku flowing through. There will be several performances based on the paintings and poems during the show’s run, including Holman reading at the opening celebration on Saturday, October 19, 6-9pm.