This work is based on the theme of ”Construction, destruction, and reconstruction” that I am currently working on. I think that the activities of the world are repeating these three cycles. Those produced in this world grow or age and break or die. Life does not rebuild itself, but takes the form of creating a new life. The substances that made up the star in the universe that has reached the end of its life will make up a new star somewhere. As the Buddha advocates, the world is impermanent and insubstantial, but I think that the activities will continue infinitely while changing their modes.
The reason for making this work was that I experienced a machine knitting workshop at the Textile Arts Center. After having been involved in dyeing kimono for a long time, I decided to try knitting kimono. Not only silk but also linen and cotton are used as materials for kimono, however, as for techniques, exclusively, a weaving technique has been used. Nowadays some designers propose kimonos using jersey materials and there was an exhibition in 2019 titled Off the Wall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where kimono-themed pieces made of knit were exhibited. https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/wall-american-art-wear
When thinking about what a kimono is, I thought it would make sense to use an unconventional technique.
In kimono dyeing, needlework is sometimes applied to the finish using a technique called Japanese embroidery, but other than that, I have never thought of making holes in a piece of cloth or doing needlework. I feel the rigidity of the kimono fabric, which does not allow intervention other than dyeing. However, the knitted kimonos I made did not retain their knitted shape and curl up due to the nature of knits, or it grew steadily due to gravity. So I made a hole and made a spider web in the hole. And I filled the whole kimono with spider webs of various sizes. In those spider webs, goose-down round balls are studded with the image of the spider's extract and prey that immobilize the prey. I gave this work the title Transition. That is because my method was changed from a dyed kimono to a knitted kimono, and the knitted plain kimono was converted to a kimono filled with embroidery of spider webs. They are the manner of “transition” of construction, destruction and reconstruction.
