Fonda Yoshimoto: Drawings

About Me

Making is a way of thinking and feeling. My work centers on emotion, individual and collective memory and experience, expressed through sculpting objects, mark making and altering spaces. I explore patterning, drawing with ink and chalk on paper and walls, and three-dimensionally with ceramics and textiles. Ornamentation in my work is voracious, constricting and expanding, winding through space and on every surface. Ornamentation can express identity, can mark belonging to a tribe, space, era, or home. The patterning takes over; I make marks out of need, a kind of anxious comfort. The space defines me, caught between creating pattern and scratching, wiping, willing it away. The mark making becomes a palimpsest, layers and layers of history, of motion, are visible. There is a physical and psychological tension in this time intensive process, as it becomes a ritual of remembrance. In each line is etched a memory; a thought, a scar, a stretch mark, a loved one or moment passed. I see my work as somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, inside and outside, healthy and unhealthy, engineered and makeshift, safe and dangerous, comforting and eerie. My process consists of an impulsive need to create, to move materials, fix, break, alter, and transform. Sometimes slow and methodical with refined craftsmanship and details, sometimes quick and rough, building out of necessity.

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Drawings