Naoko Inuzuka

2016

Installation of Objects

Mild steel, Copper, Enamel, Sterling silver, Copper pipe

Photo by Simon Strong

Considering the affects of time, Naoko in her work Becoming Locals deliberates on the notion of ‘home’ and belonging, through ideas of diasporic communities over successive generations. Naoko’s work was formed as a result of a research trip to Hawaii in order to engage with the Japanese diaspora, but equally reflects on ideas of cosmopolitanism, the ideology that all of us essentially belong to a single community. Becoming Locals forms through ideas of re-location as a contemporary phenomenon, examining mobility and cultural hybridism.

‘Multiculturalism is an older 20^th Century term. In visiting Hawaii with its indigenous people, immigrants historically from Asia and Portugal, and contemporaneously as part of the US, it seems clear that people in the Japanese diaspora aren’t concerned with the question of where they belong. Rather, I felt that there is more of a sense of ‘un-belonging’, where people have chosen to become ‘local’’ .' (Inuzuka, 2016)

Text by Peter Westwood

2015

Interactive installation

(top left) Flood (Neckpiece)

(on the floor) 'Afterflood' (Brooches)

(right) Cumulus (brooches)

Mild steel wire, Copper, Enamel, Stainless steel wire, Copper pipe

Where is my place of belonging?

Where is 'home'?

Reflecting on this through the element of nature, and in particular the circulation of water (the falling of rain, the formation of puddles, the genesis of mist and of clouds), we can be aware, or reminded of 'process of becoming'.

In my practice I am investigating clouds for their essence while examining the formless manifestation of water. From the perspective of considering this subject matter in terms of its potential to provide visual allusions, I consider this to be akin to how I, or anyone, might be deemed a particle within time and in nature, reflecting on how particles of personal experience accumulate to create 'the whole', a community, a home.

2015

Installation

at a group exhibition Solstice

with Aurelia Yeomans and Inari Kiuru

(from left)

I'm saturated (Neckpiece)

I'm crying (Neckpiece)

I belong (Object)

I'm floating (Neckpiece)

Where have I gone? (Neckpiece)

Sterling silver, Mild steel

I'm interested in the element of a cloud: small particles creating a whole image that is ever-changing. As a migrant, I give a friendly glance to a cloud travelling the massive Australian sky, as something reflecting my internal landscape. In a similar way, I see each individual person as an element in the natural and cultural flow that create our constantly changing world.

I see a neckpiece as a sign revealing the wearer's status by its quiet but powerful visual presence. The idea is inspired by an image of a man looking for his missing wife, just after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake in 2011, wearing a placard of her face. Nagareru (It flows), a series of neckpieces and an object, represent signs that show the wearer's internal state. This series is for people in a flow and on the move: for migrants and for the millions of people affected by the phenomenon of global migration; us.