Cutting to the heart of the gardens in her past
Published 10:00 am Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Rice paper work by Michiko Olson is featured on the Bloom Tour poster.
It’s clear that Michiko Olson lavished time on “The Garden in My Memory,” the cut-paper artwork selected to be this year’s poster for the Bainbridge in Bloom Garden Tour.
The Japanese technique of slicing away black rice paper, then filling the negative shapes with hand-colored paper, is a painstaking process that may demand a hundred knife strokes to shape a single flower.
In the work, visual elements like the dragonfly and grasshopper lead the eye out of the frame and back again, while the plant forms create counter-clockwise movement within the picture plane.
The poster is representative of Olson’s body of work, complex compositions which demand painstaking planning.
“I take a long time for researching and drawing, how to position and color,” the island artist said, “and finding the right flowers.”
Once a composition is sketched, Olson traces the design and then layers tracing paper on black paper and, fixing both on a board with rice paste, cuts both layers.
“When I cut both together, I don’t see the exact image because the tracing paper is on the top,” she said, “so it’s kind of exciting to wait.”
Finally, she adds the bottom layer of colored paper that fills out the cut forms.
For Olson, making a picture is a way of recreating a world lost to her, the village of Kameda on the Japan seacoast where she grew up.
The architectural elements of her family’s traditional farmhouse are reflected in her work, like the white squares that define “The Garden in My Memory,” meant to echo the rice paper shoji screens that enclosed the rooms of the farmhouse.
The lotus flowers of the poster design evoke, for her, the ponds Olson played in, and the plants and insects she recalls from her youth.
“As a child, I loved to catch insects, cicadas and grasshoppers in the summer and bright red dragonflies in fall,” she said. “I also loved to draw and paint. I drew the insects that I caught and I made comic books with my friends. Sometimes after dinner, my parents cut flowers from the yard, and we all sat together and drew them.”
In another paper work, Olson recreates her childhood home blanketed in fresh snow, shoji screens open to show the family celebrating the New Year.
The universality of the longing for a home now decades behind, captured in the beautiful and fragile medium of rice paper, makes Olson’s work eloquent.
The traditional Japanese medium of cut paper is often used in spiritual practice and celebration, Olson says. She cites the small cut-paper boats, or “Takarabune,” put under pillows for the Japanese New Year to ensure good dreams and good luck.
After World War II, a Chinese version of the cut paper – a more-detailed method called Shenshi – was adapted by Japanese artists, who shaded the paper to give their artwork dimension. The Japanese fine artists called the technique Kirie, and employed it to make a range of works from book illustration to lampshades.
Olson, who moved to the United States in the late 1980s and studied at Parsons School of Design in New York City, has been using the technique since 1990.
“I’ve become more and more interested in Japanese culture,” she said. “I think many people feel the same way who come to a different country. They’re starved for their own culture.”
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The 2004 Bainbridge In Bloom Garden Tour, a fund-raiser for the Bainbridge Arts and Humanities Council, will be held July 10-11. The tour poster, featuring work by Michiko Olson, and Early Bird tickets ($25 for adults, $12 for children ages 4-12) can be purchased at www.gardentour.info.
