Vast when you’d expect insular

My concern with liminal and negative spaces began in 2010 during my research in Tokyo, Japan, supported by the Carson Grant. I studied Japanese theories of perceived empty space; how absence produces meaning, how the interval between objects or people forms relationships; tension, intimacy, or distance. A vase is defined by its interior; lovers are defined by emotions shifting spaces between them.

My work uses installation to investigate the gallery’s liminal volume as the conduit of our relationship, “Vast when you’d expect Insular” follows the traditions of anti-monumental, postminimalist works like Polly Apfelbaum’s “fallen paintings” or Eva Hesse’s “draped sculptures;” works that reject verticality and sink into the floor as quiet acts of protest, resignation, or resilience. My works use objects to draw in three-dimensional space. These objects, made for practical use, unintentionally resemble natural forms. Mimicking nature without the intentionality to mimic. I repurpose them into fictitious, hand- and machine-made habitats, building what could be considered sea animals, cell organisms, clouds, webs, dried fungus, or plants such as kudzu.

I think about kudzu often. As a child, I watched it slowly engulf the trees near my school. Years later, I saw a photograph of kudzu, of a house entirely overtaken, smothered. Today I live beside kudzu again; despite its reputation as “invasive,” I think of it fondly. Its persistence mirrors something in me. 

After 35 years, I received my adoption paperwork. My parents told me to take it back to Manila. It held my birth mother’s name, her address, my birthplace, and the orphanage. Though curious, I cannot search for her. The details bring up feelings I cannot confront; like my work, I live inside a hand- and machine-made invention of myself, and I choose to smother the longing like kudzu overtaking. I left the paperwork in Hawaii.

-Kelli Maeshiro