Grow in Light

Artist Wendy Kawabata presents a major installation in her exhibition Grow in Light; comprised of hundreds of handmade crochet flowers, Grow in Light sprawls across an entire gallery wall, appearing at once organic in form and routine in its laborious making.  Begun during an artist’s residency in Iceland, the work is a reflection of Kawabata’s simultaneous acclimatisation and resistance to the patterns of near constant daylight: “The incongruity between wild nature and industry in Iceland’s highlands left me feeling spare and dislocated. These flowers are not something else, or somewhere else. While borne from a search for the wild, they have become routine.”

Kawabata’s pervasive handiwork is also evident in her intricately made drawings and perforated paper works, which demonstrate the same time-heavy and laborious process as Kawabata’s crochet work and earlier folded-book installations. Kawabata’s Acts series are translations of crocheted items that never existed in their final documented form.  These highly detailed drawings seem to transpose the language of sewing or crochet instructions to another manifestation, closely aligned to the process of drawing and to the feminine craft tradition and daily domestic acts. 

Kawabata’s approach is conducted within a space of making which is traditionally seen to reinforce feminine, maternal, and domestic roles. Kawabata also relates this process to a very organic progression: “The works ask for the consideration and gratitude given a first attempt at handmade work filled with mistakes but completed and gifted despite its flaws. Overt in their construction and economy, value is embedded into each drawing through times spent.”

BIOGRAPHY
Wendy Kawabata is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, Hawaii. She received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She is the recipient of a 2012-2013 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues in the U.S. and New Zealand. Her work has received recognition from national and international publications including, Art in America, Modern Painters, Artweek, and NO Magazine.