Vast when you’d expect Insular

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My concern with liminal and negative spaces began in 2010 during my research in Tokyo, Japan, supported by the Carson Grant. I studied Japanese theories of perceived empty space; how absence produces meaning, how the interval between objects or people forms relationships; tension, intimacy, or distance. A vase is defined by its interior; lovers are defined by emotions shifting spaces between them. My work uses installation to investigate the gallery’s liminal volume as the conduit of our relationship, between myself and the viewer.

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“Vast when you’d expect Insular” follows the traditions of anti-monumental, postminimalist works like Polly Apfelbaum’s “fallen paintings” or Eva Hesse’s “draped sculptures;” works that reject verticality and sink into the floor as quiet acts of protest, resignation, or resilience. My works use objects to draw in three-dimensional space. These objects, made for practical use, unintentionally resemble natural forms. Mimicking nature without the intentionality to mimic. I repurpose them into fictitious, hand- and machine-made habitats, building what could be considered sea animals, cell organisms, clouds, webs, dried fungus, or plants such as kudzu.

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I think about kudzu often. As a child, I watched it slowly engulf the trees near my school. Years later, I saw a photograph of kudzu, of a house entirely overtaken, smothered. Today I live beside kudzu again; despite its reputation as “invasive,” I think of it fondly. Its persistence mirrors something in me.

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After 35 years, I received my adoption paperwork. My parents told me to take it back to Manila. It held my birth mother’s name, her address, my birthplace, and the orphanage. Though curious, I cannot search for her. The details bring up feelings I cannot confront; like my work, I live inside a hand- and machine-made invention of myself, and I choose to smother the longing like kudzu overtaking. I left the paperwork in Hawaii.

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—Kelli Maeshiro

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