— Kyoto Collage. Hung in the entryway.
For this one, the result isn't the point — the co-created process was. See how it was made →Reading In Praise of Shadows, Then Two Weeks of Gold
I read In Praise of Shadows about a month before Japan. Tanizaki is funnier than I expected. Throughout the trip I kept noticing things he'd taught me to see: how the Japanese use reflection, how they use gold, how a single low light can do what a whole bright room cannot.
It didn't stop. The gold leaf on the temples in Kyoto. The gold seams in kintsugi. My reflection in the jumble of balls at Kusama's Narcissus Garden in Naoshima. The funhouse mirror effect in the toilet at the Teshima Yokoo House. Watching (for an absurd amount of hypnotic time!) streams of water droplets reflect and merge at the Teshima Art Museum. The gold detail in paintings at the Sato Sakura Museum. That lens stays with me.
When I got back to Atlanta, I had a collage class starting and I incorporated this vein into the piece. I'd asked each of my travel companions to draw something about Japan on small watercolor cards I found at Tokyu Hands. I used our shared drawings as part of my canvas.
The one thing I couldn't put in the collage was the bouquet of geisha flowers we had in our Airbnb. The whole villa smelled of it for a week. I never took a picture. But I remember that smell and experience it again every time I walk into my house.