Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam is one of Japan's leading fibre artists, and one of a very small number that sometimes use knitting or crochet in their work. Living in Canada, she now specialises in creating large, interactive textile environments that function both as imaginative and vibrant explorations of colour and form.
Fibre columns/Romanesque Church
The beginning of her career coincided with the development of 'fibre art' as an active sub-section within the fine art world. Her work was very much a part of the new wave of fibre art that happened in the 1970's, and she was one of several Japanese artists to make a deep impression.
Nylon 6-6
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constructed net, crochet | ||||
Horiuchi called the work which resulted from her change of direction, 'Sculpture for Children'.
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She describes the various factors that lead to this shift. Ever since her earliest work as a designer with a New York interior textile company she had been pondering the question, 'what is cloth?'. It was a question that continued to intrigue her. Cloth, she concluded, is a second skin and so, like skin, it is thin, it stretches and is comfortable to the touch and it is porous. Like skin, it can breath - a perforated membrane. |
It was while she was trying to capture this notion within her work in a joint project with Naoko Furue in 1971 that she first discovered that there was another 'human' aspect to the essence of cloth that she had overlooked.
It all happened quite by accident. Two children had entered the gallery where she was exhibiting 'Multiple Hammock No. 1' and, blissfully unaware of the usual polite protocols that govern the display of fine art, asked to use it. She watched nervously as they climbed into the structure, but then was thrilled to find that the work suddenly came alive in ways she had never really anticipated. She noticed that the fabric took on new life - swinging and stretching with the weight of the small bodies, forming pouches and other unexpected transformations, and above all there were the sounds of the undisguised delight of children exploring a new play space. She felt it was almost as if she had discovered a new dimension. The children played with such abandon that it was almost as if they were playing inside a mothers womb.