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A three-person show for Aichi Triennale 2025 with Erika Kane and Nagoya-based fiber artist, Yasuyo Kamimura
In November 2025, we will installed Nami wo sou (Weaving the Waves) at the Chojamachi Cotton Building in Nagoya’s Naka Ward, a district once central to Japan’s cotton trade. Kane and I come to this collaboration from Indiana, a midwestern state in the USA. The American contribution to the installation traces the intertwined yet divergent histories of cotton in Japan and America, drawing on Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History to map the plant’s journey through labor, capital, and empire.
Working mainly with 100% cotton denim paper, Kane and I developed a series of responsive material explorations. We created three large-scale sheets, one light, one dark, one mixed, that reference cotton’s dual nature as both humble cloth of the working class as well as an instrument of empire. It also acknowledges the Japanese/American connections embodied in jeans and their roots in chattel slavery. Indigo was brought to cotton garments by African slaves who knew these skills from their motherland. Alongside these larger sheets sit fourteen smaller sheets that combine to form a larger composition, their individual fragments suggesting the many hands and interconnected histories woven into a single bale of cotton. From this jeans paper pulp, we also sculpted a sphinx and a column, forms drawn from the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. “The Chariot” card, with its twin sphinxes, is interpreted as conquest and controlled power; the column evokes the Tower, a symbol of empire’s fragility and inevitable fall. These sculptures investigate cotton’s dark American legacy, where the plant became inseparable from enslavement, extraction, and the violent machinery of war capitalism.
To root this global narrative in the intimate and regenerative space, we grew cotton from seed and knit a glove in parallel with Yasuyo—one that reaches across the Pacific to clasp hands with a glove made in Japan. Together with Yasuyo’s practice of reviving local textile memory in a city rapidly losing its physical traces, Nami wo sou weaves a fabric that holds both nations’ histories, acknowledging what was lost and what persists in the fiber.