ーーーーーThe “walkways” we humans pass along each day, and the “wildways” formed by the passage of animals through forests and thickets.

Artcourt Gallery is holding a solo exhibition of the work of Chisato Yamano, whose creations charm the viewer with their visions of people and animals mingling, playing and living together.

A tiny world that can fit in the palm of your hand. Up-and-coming contemporary ceramic artist Chisato Yamano incorporates scenes from our daily lives, and human and animal poses and images from memories of dreams and the like, to fashion imaginary worlds that mix the “ordinary” and the “non-ordinary”. She creates by working from the motifs that emerge out of her improvisational fingertip movements of pinching and twisting the clay, and these motifs are then layered like plays on words with various associations of images. Yamano says that applies a sensibility similar to that of scale-model production, and that the orientation in her works often develops accidentally within that process.

In Yamano’s wonderfully original visions, the people and animals and plants are building new relationships, regardless of differences in scale. The viewer is both lured by the rhythms of the faint colorings of each of their forms, and excited by the happy, humor-filled worlds and their continuing narratives. The unusual titles – Frilled-Neck Castle, Chipmunk-Weight Chicken Fight Title Match and Dog-People Land — Large Plate, to name a few – is another aspect of the appeal of Yamano’s work.

At this exhibition, we will be showing approximately fifteen pieces, from new ceramic sculptural works to painted plates and paper cutout pieces. Drawing on Yamano’s experience of “going on walks and occasionally encountering animals passing along their trails,” we have envisioned an exhibition that treats these different paths as “walkways” and “wildways” that correspond to the “ordinary” and the “non-ordinary”, respectively; and in this way, we will provide a symbolic representation of Yamano’s work today, which she has been creating in recent years at her base in an abundant natural setting on an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. We hope you will join us in enjoying this marvelously fanciful, fun-filled world that seems to describe certain paths of stories, wherein the “ordinary” and the “non-ordinary” meet, and culture and wildness intersect.