altitude

aaploit presents altitude, a solo exhibition by Kumagai Ayano, on view from November 3 through November 27, 2022.

Kumagai's practice originates in her experience of mountaineering. She creates work as if expressing the alpine plants encountered in extreme environments—flowers that bloom in places difficult for humans to reach—and the strength of life and the conditions that surround it.

Kumagai's work takes life as its motif, exploring the relationship between two and three dimensions through dyeing and stitching on textile. On a flat surface composed as a textile panel, three-dimensional knitted forms are built up—what the artist herself calls reliefs.

The embroidery and knitting applied to the canvas show vivid, lively expression. Yet the alpine plants that serve as motifs carry the strength to grow in harsh environments that are difficult for humans to enter. The exhibition title, altitude, is an attempt to consider that strength and to inquire into where life resides.

Kumagai says that at altitudes too harsh for human habitation, she feels the distance between herself and living things. In the thin air of high mountains, where the danger of falling is real, she senses life. Through making, she questions where life resides, blurs that boundary, and moves toward unity. Each work seems to anchor the location of a life within it.

altitude presents a plant with red stems and leaves and scattered white petals on a blue-dyed textile ground. The petals filling the surface are embroidered with forms evoking filaments at their centers, and petals gather around the stem. The background petals suggest a colony of flowers; the red-stemmed flower rising into the foreground seems to represent individual life and character. A contrast that also evokes human society overflows from the work.

Kumagai uses textile as a support and calls the works she builds through stitching reliefs. Their sculptural dimensionality seems to accumulate—or inscribe—the artist's physicality and experience.

For inquiries regarding the exhibition and works, please contact info@aaploit.com.