Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami)

Art Gallery of South Australia

Adelaide SA

Japanese-born South Australian artist and 2023 Guildhouse Fellow Kyoko Hashimoto presents an exhibition of her work titled Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami), as part of her Guildhouse Fellowship. The exhibition is the culmination of a year of intensive research by the artist during a pivotal time in her life.

After a period of ill health in 2022, Hashimoto asked herself: ‘What is my purpose as an artist, in this world?’ The answers to her question were personal and universal, with her exhibition imagining a more sustainable way of living, whereby the health of the human body intimately mirrors the health of the ecological world.

Hashimoto moved away from the hard metals of her practice as a contemporary jeweller. Instead, she used foraged plant materials transforming them into a range of paper mâché objects or collaged into intricately patterned necklaces or sculptures.

Similarly, rocks from her garden were pounded to create paints. The imagery of her abstract paintings was inspired by the petrographic structure of those rocks, their appearance captured by microscopy at a specialist laboratory in Adelaide. The geological formation of the land on which Hashimoto works was revealed through the wafer-thin slices of rock pressed onto glass plates.