Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, Oxford
Ricca Kawai’s art is technically compelling, intellectually suggestive and emotionally poignant.
Her series of raindrops and on glass is characteristic of her use of unpredictable phenomena – in this case the cohering, trickling and coalescing of the liquid particles in accordance with surface tension. From this process, shape emerges elusively at the limits of seeing and coherence. It is as if some previ- ous deposit on a speci c region of the glass, or some residual trace of energy, has acted to attract and repel the dispersed droplets.
But more than technical ingenuity is involved. The ghostly fragments are suffused by sweet melancholy. I was reminded of the second verse of Tennyson’s poem, Tears, Idle Tears:
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Her enigmatic images transcend scale. They are redolent of the minutest and vastest physical phenomena in the universe – sometimes dark, sometimes uneasy, sometimes radiant, sometimes pretty. Particular formations are akin to fractals and the residues formed by chemical aggregation. Through visual sensitivity and intuition, she is tapping into age-old realms of order and disorder that have been part of the life-blood of art and science. (2016)
Ricca Kawai’s art is technically compelling, intellectually suggestive and emotionally poignant.
Her series of raindrops and on glass is characteristic of her use of unpredictable phenomena – in this case the cohering, trickling and coalescing of the liquid particles in accordance with surface tension. From this process, shape emerges elusively at the limits of seeing and coherence. It is as if some previ- ous deposit on a speci c region of the glass, or some residual trace of energy, has acted to attract and repel the dispersed droplets.
But more than technical ingenuity is involved. The ghostly fragments are suffused by sweet melancholy. I was reminded of the second verse of Tennyson’s poem, Tears, Idle Tears:
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Her enigmatic images transcend scale. They are redolent of the minutest and vastest physical phenomena in the universe – sometimes dark, sometimes uneasy, sometimes radiant, sometimes pretty. Particular formations are akin to fractals and the residues formed by chemical aggregation. Through visual sensitivity and intuition, she is tapping into age-old realms of order and disorder that have been part of the life-blood of art and science. (2016)
Colin Wiggins, Curator
Ricca Kawai’s new work does not loudly proclaim its existence. It does not shout out and demand attention. Instead, it sits quietly as if trying to disguise itself and hide away from immediate notice. Its strength is its fragility, like a spider’s web in the morning dew. At first glance, we are aware of what looks like drops of rain gathering together and clinging to clear glass window panes. Is there anything in the world more transitory? It is something we have all seen and is so commonplace that we hardly pay attention to it. We have all had the experience of seeing – and listening to - little droplets of rain pattering onto our windows. They briefly cling to the glass and trickle downwards, before they lose their individual identity and become merged as one. And then they evaporate and disappear.
Ricca has always been fascinated with the traces of things, whether on the scale of something tiny and intimate, like a raindrop, or something unimagina- bly vast, like a picture of a distant galaxy containing millions of stars. In her ink paintings, a work such as ‘Wormhole’, refers to the scale of the universe and how the hugeness of distant galaxies becomes diminished by distance, allowing us on earth to perceive them as beautiful abstract patterns. ‘Neutrino’, on the other hand, refers to the tiniest of sub-atomic particles. Her delicate blotches of ink take on those same shapes and forms that we can find in astronomical or microscopic photography, as she allows the apparent randomness of the flow of her chosen medium to take on a similar appearance to those shapes and forms that exist both on a huge scale, in the far reaches of the universe, yet also right in front of us, in the mysterious world of the sub-atomic.
Given the scale of the universe, it is almost comically futile that we humans should try to explore it, to leave behind the safety of our home planet and leave our own traces in the cosmos. And yet this is what we have done and that great pioneer, Yuri Gagarin, the very first cosmonaut, has become a sym- bol of human endeavour.
Gagarin is gone now but, in the same way that Leonardo da Vinci used to enjoy looking for recognizable forms and shapes in discoloured patches that occur on damp walls, or in the dancing patterns of ames in a replace, Ricca imagines an echo of his spirit in the patterns made by those raindrops clinging to our windows. (2013)
Toyo Ito, Architect
Images residing in our memory emerge from dripping water and dissolve into water drop- lets again. Perhaps being, for her, is a constant flux, as alternation between abstraction and figuration in nature. (2013)
Images residing in our memory emerge from dripping water and dissolve into water drop- lets again. Perhaps being, for her, is a constant flux, as alternation between abstraction and figuration in nature. (2013)
Taro Amano, Head Curator, Yokohama Civic Gallery Azamino
On transparency as a medium
Kawai has created a new form of expression in which light and shadow coexist and interact when illuminating a transparent pictorial material/support, works she calls photoskiagraphia after the Greek photo (light), skia (shadow) and graphia (picture).
There exist astronomical phenomena that have mass but cannot be optically observed. Such so-called “dark matter” tells us that the world is not necessarily composed only of things we can see. Diving right into these findings, Kawai takes as her theme the challenge of making this invisible realm visible. Working with epoxy resin since 2003, she used “water droplets” of transparent resin applied to a window panel in a 2013 self-portrait to let raindrops bring out the form, which then acted as a lens to cast both light and shadow onto the wall.
Kawai’s artistic process recalls Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (vol. 35), wherein the traced silhouette of a lover killed in battle becomes a painting. Shadow drawings, or in Kawai’s terminology skiagraphie, likewise bear relation to the calotype “shadow fixing” technique of early photography. What Kawai seems to be seeking via the transparency of resin as a medium is not the simple reality that even translucence produces shadows, but rather to show how various contingent aspects — the thickness or clarity of the medium — effect a transformation. Not in the given visible image as we might expect, but an experience of generating a transformed image out of an unimaginable unseen realm. (2018)
On transparency as a medium
Kawai has created a new form of expression in which light and shadow coexist and interact when illuminating a transparent pictorial material/support, works she calls photoskiagraphia after the Greek photo (light), skia (shadow) and graphia (picture).
There exist astronomical phenomena that have mass but cannot be optically observed. Such so-called “dark matter” tells us that the world is not necessarily composed only of things we can see. Diving right into these findings, Kawai takes as her theme the challenge of making this invisible realm visible. Working with epoxy resin since 2003, she used “water droplets” of transparent resin applied to a window panel in a 2013 self-portrait to let raindrops bring out the form, which then acted as a lens to cast both light and shadow onto the wall.
Kawai’s artistic process recalls Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (vol. 35), wherein the traced silhouette of a lover killed in battle becomes a painting. Shadow drawings, or in Kawai’s terminology skiagraphie, likewise bear relation to the calotype “shadow fixing” technique of early photography. What Kawai seems to be seeking via the transparency of resin as a medium is not the simple reality that even translucence produces shadows, but rather to show how various contingent aspects — the thickness or clarity of the medium — effect a transformation. Not in the given visible image as we might expect, but an experience of generating a transformed image out of an unimaginable unseen realm. (2018)