Mayumi Enoki
An exhibition of contemporary ink painting, printing and installation
5th February – March 31st 2019
open 10-5pm Monday-Friday
also by contacting 004420 7403 1353
STUDIO SIENKO GALLERY
57A Lant Street, London, SE1 1QN
studiosienko@waterloowine.co.uk
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
As for g, and
Rendering gravity.
People do not usually feel the weight of air.
Imagine that the weight exists.
Ink that does not move anymore.
Steady ink.
Moving ink is on paper. The oil does not dry as it is — fluid Ink.
A painting mixes with oil. The flow of paint is speed — the
appearance of velocity.
Michael Jackson's dance.
A soccer player who nobody can touch.
Babies lay down in gravity.
Eventually, they will learn how to resist.
Aged people even lie no longer resist gravity.
Beyond gravity, without recognizing it.
Then you can see gravity as rendering.
ABOUT
Mayumi Enoki was born in Hiroshima in 1960 and lives and works in Okayama
City, Japan.
A way of stacking or layering paper forms the starting point of Enoki’s work,
creating images of a residue which are hand-printed on Japanese paper or
Chinese paper and then mostly worked into with pencil, watercolour and
Japanese Sumi-ink and oil.
The idea of our stacked everyday life and a piling sense of impermanence within
our nature leads to Enoki’s pieces. She realises that stacking or layering paper
leaves spaces between every sheet, which takes on a broader meaning as a gap,
an in-between. It produces various relationships and has remained as a particle
All things have both a front and a back, switching shifts and overturn, visible and
invisible, and positive and negative. Life and death always exist right beside us.
We always live in the in-between of the world, therefore, which remind us of
phenomenal feelings such as the transience of life and a sense of wistfulness. In
Enoki’s conception, the world consists of such noticed residues between stacks.
Enoki has focused on gravity as a visual vocabulary in her latest artworks. "We
live in two worlds: reality and virtual on the earth. I think the rules of Physics
and its image are the starting point of our creativity," she says. "When I make
Monotype-printmaking onto a paper by my hands, pushing towards the ground
equals the ground pushing back to me. It abides by the action-reaction law.
When I paint with oil on paper, fluid oil flows to show velocity and acceleration.
It works with gravity rather than against it. All artists use the laws of Physics for
making their art. The creative rendering process therefore leads to a lot of
variety from their original methods."
