7th May 1956, 8th May 1956

Catalog note / 解説

Nana Shiomi (born 1956) is a Japanese artist who studied printmaking at the RCA and has worked in the UK for 20 years. Her prints fuse influences from east and west. Japanese architecture and landscapes feature in her work, as does the idea of mirroring which is inherent in printmaking, with the block or plate and the print in opposite configurations. She works with woodcut, a tradtional technique but her work is inflected with the ideas and the perspective of someone who has lived for a long time outside Japan. '7th May 1956, 8th May 1956' is a diptych arranged vertically, with both images printed from the same blocks in exactly the same way. Shiomi makes the point here that although print…