The way I see the object to be drawn reflects my feelings. I think creating a work is a process where I examine my own state of mind. In recent years, I have made works that are sometimes based on natural objects, and sometimes on everyday products. When I use a natural object as a motif for a work, the feelings that nature arouses in me are reflected in it. In this case, I feel that I have truly met myself. When an everyday product is the motif of the work, the process is fundamentally the same, but there is one interesting difference compared to the process of drawing a natural object: unlike natural products, behind everyday products there is always someone who made the product. When I make a work out of an everyday product, it reflects not only my own feelings, but a certain sense of empathy. I feel that in this way I get an increasingly general picture of the human mind through my own experiences. For these reasons, it is important for me to draw both natural and everyday products.
Recently, I have been particularly interested in images where two opposing forms are balanced. It reminds me that consciousness and unconsciousness together make up the personality. I make the assumption that the balance of two opposite things means the existence of something or a person. Through working on the works, I explored this assumption more deeply than I had made. As I explored this hypothesis more, I tried to more and more authentically embody existence by using only lateral inhibition (commonly known as the phenomenon where things near a bright object appear darker than they really are) of the drawing elements. This is how the works of the Spirit of Ghost series, which can also be seen in this exhibition, were born.
The Spirit of Ghost series is a continuation of the dry needlework I’ve done so far. The exhibition features series of works from different stages of my path: the No edition series, born in the early stages of the introduction of dry needle technique, the Yes or No series, which explores the diversity of expression of dry needle technique, which began this spring, and the Spirit of Ghost series and related recent works.
– Naoji Ishiyama
Naoji Ishiyama was born in Niihama prefecture, Japan in 1965. After graduating with a master’s degree (Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts), he started his career as a printmaker in 1994. He moved to Finland in 2003 and started working at the Jyväskylä graphics and photography center Ratamo as a printmaker and foreman. Ishiyama began exploring the dry needling technique in 2011 and continues to expand its possibilities in the expression of his works.
