Aya Nakamura’s colored pencil drawings, often on irregularly shaped handmade paper that she makes in her Chicago studio, are built slowly and through layered applications of colored pencil. Nakamura describes her aesthetic sensibility as “magpie,” an attraction to disparate things that compel attention through their distinctiveness or evocative power, and toriawase, a Japanese term referring to the bringing together of varied elements to create a resonant whole. She thinks of each element in the drawing as a consciousness that engages directly with its neighbors and aggregates into a larger entity, like an anthill. The result is a series of encounters and references to sense memories of her relationship to nature and to sound, a permeability of space and form, embedded sensitivities, and touch. Variegated lines move across, alongside and into fields of color, and these assemble into amorphous compositions that appear to simultaneously build and dissolve. Some have visual links to existing symbols and objects, which provide a starting point and focus.
Over the past year, Nakamura’s attention has turned toward features of a home she and her partner have recently moved into, and the human body. What has emerged is a series of drawings that uncovers the uncanny and “creaturely” qualities shared by the built and the bodily, allowing one to stand in for the other.
Aya Nakamura is a co-founder of Switch Grass Paper, a paper-making studio born out of concerns about papermaking, prairie, land immersion and art. In Chicago, she has had solo shows at Western Exhibitions, 4th Ward Project Space and Rainbo Club and has been included in group shows at Carrie Secrist, The Research House for Asian Art, Heaven Gallery and Roman Susan. Outside Chicago she has shown at The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Mana Decentralized in Jersey City, NJ; and MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL. She is the recipient of the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a member of Chicago API (Asian, Pacific Islander) Artists United (CAAU). Her work had reviewed in New City here, here and here. Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the United States, holding a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MF from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.