Fig. 1 Kizuna, Installation View, 2024

Kizuna (絆) explores the ways connections are formed, carried, and transformed over time. The series takes its name from the Japanese word for bonds or ties, a concept that extends beyond individual relationships to include the threads that connect people, places, memories, and experiences.

Landscape serves as a way of seeing these relationships through pattern and accumulation. I am drawn to the formations revealed through distance—the pathways, fields, waterways, and networks that emerge when a landscape is viewed from above. These patterns reveal connections that are not always visible at ground level and share a quiet relationship with weaving, where individual threads gather to create larger structures. The warp and weft of textiles find a quiet parallel in the grids and coordinates through which landscapes are measured and understood.

Language becomes another terrain through which connection is explored. The works incorporate Japanese written forms, particularly characters containing the 糸 (ito) radical, associated with thread and connection. Through fragmentation, reconfiguration, and shifts between kanji and hiragana, written language becomes something to observe, transform, and inhabit.

Alongside these explorations of landscape and language are quieter works inspired by natural forms—water, clouds, petals, butterflies, and pathways. These works draw from the Japanese sensibility of kachōfūgetsu (花鳥風月), where elements of the natural world become expressions of fleeting moments and seasonal change.