Yuki Murata makes paintings out of the ground they describe. The pigment is soil, gathered by hand from the land around her studio and bound into work that is as much a record of walking as of painting. She adds micaceous clay, which is native to northern New Mexico and has been worked here for centuries, and natural pigment inks. Then she lays geometry over the top of it.
Biography
Murata is an artist and designer based in Santa Fe. She trained as a product and architectural designer, and that training is visible in everything she makes: the square formats, the ruled repetition, the refusal of the accidental. She works to a leave-no-trace principle, taking only small amounts of material from the places she draws on and prioritising non-toxic and sustainably sourced pigments.
In the collection’s words
“The geometry and structure of my work is an artifact from my training as a product and architectural designer. The linear repetition is a meditation on the restoration and repair I am searching for in our splintered, suffering world. I habitually return to square formats to bring stability to ideas I find disorienting. By using materials gathered from the property around where I work as well as micaceous clay and natural pigments inks, I create a visual contemplation on the beauty of wild land and our place in it.”
What we respond to is the double reading. Stand back and it is landscape. Stand close and it is arithmetic. Very few artists hold both at once without one of them going slack.
Continue exploring
- UNBROKEN, where her work hung alongside Patrick McFarlin and Robert Stivers
- Navajo (Diné) weavings, another body of work built from wool, plant, and mineral rather than from a tube
- All exhibitions at Webster Collection
- The fine art collection and the antiquities
- Living in Santa Fe
