Instagram @tomoko_nagakawa
Tomoko Nagakawa
JAPAN
I am a photographer based in Buckinghamshire, UK. Born in Tokyo, Japan, graduated from Nihon University College of Art.
I use printing techniques on selected papers to create visually minimalist yet imaginatively expansive objects that serve as a suggestive launchpad for open interpretation.
My work explores the awakening of our unconscious from silence, in order to inspire us to feel connected to the invisible.
My focus is to achieve objects which somehow touch our physical senses.
Using my own hands is the most important aspect of my work.
I describe my methods as "letter writing".
Choosing the inks and letterheads, wishing the right words are revealed to express a thought, while imagining the recipient. Laying emulsion following the rhythm of my own breathing, my existence becomes part of this physical communication.
The slowness of letters reaching others creates the space of time and my thoughts travel patiently with the letter until it reaches its destination.
- SERIES -
I taste the Blacklight
This is my way to deal with uncertainty of memory and time.
Through my family’s ageing I realised that there are di!erent versions of life that exist in parallel with one unknown to me.I began searching for “the other” and finding both grief and solace.
"Once upon a time, there lived a young fisherman who saved a turtle tortured by children.
The turtle says he will take him to the Dragon Palace under the sea as a reward.
The fisherman jumps on the back of the turtle, arrives at the palace and is entertained for several days by the princess. When he decides to return, the princess gives him a treasure box, but warns him never to open it.
Upon arrival at his village, his parents are dead and everyone he once knew is gone. Only a vague memory of a young fisherman who disappeared long ago is known by anyone in the village. In despair over the loss of all he knows, he sits on the beach, opens the treasure box, and his age comes out of the box. He soon aged so much that he became a crane and flew away."