Tamiko Kawata

To encounter Kawata’s work is to engage directly with her biography: her intimate practice excavates the intersections of Japanese and American identity, especially the material particularities of her diasporic experience. Kawata first began using safety pins, not commonly used in Japan, to adapt to American clothing sizes, which were often too long for her. Beginning with a safety pin wearable art collection—which was written up in the New York Times in 1973—the artist began weaving them into metal sculptures in 1978.

As a sculptor, Kawata harnesses the safety pin’s interlocking, additive energy, to create delicate chains, sprawling meshes, gridded weavings, and undulating sculptural forms. Inspired by bamboo shoots, nests, and anemones, these works are both biomorphic and geometric. Skillfully experimenting with the textural qualities of metal and thoughtfully-timed exposure to the elements, Kawata achieves a range of tones, from a pristine nickel, to a golden tarnish, to a rich rust. The prosaic safety pin stands as an emblem of women’s labor, namely in the hemming of clothes and work with textile, craft, childcare. In the artist’s sculptural work, they become a clever response to adjacent movements and practices: they nod to Ruth Asawa’s organic looped-wire sculptures while also complicating the minimalist grids of Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt.

Kawata’s background in cement and wood sculpture informs an attention to grain and texture: in her cardboard works, thoughtful cuts and scores reveal the corrugated cross-sections of its interior construction, echoing the scaffolding of Manhattan architecture through the discards of modern progress. Kawata’s site-specific pantyhose installation likewise probes issues of gender and environmental waste: inspired by the attention given to women’s legs in America, her waterfalls of used pantyhose reinterpret a symbolic yet disposable everyday material.

The exhibition presents a survey of works on paper, sculptures, and wall-mounted installations to highlight Kawata’s rigorous experimentation with material properties: American visual diaries of a progressive spirit committed to both personal and aesthetic freedom.