I often get new ideas while I’m taking a bath, which is why I’d like to go to Minamioguni. I’d also like to have local artists perform in my installation.

Post-Residency Plans

I will hold an exhibition at the Chisenhale Project Space and write an article for AANews magazine. In addition to a book I’ll publish, I also want to present in places like Moscow, Siberia, and St. Petersburg. I will also update my blog and Facebook during my residency.

Artist in Aso 2014 Work Overview

Instead of an artist visiting from the freezing expanses of Siberia, Uliana is actually based in London where she is involved in urban installations. Upon first meeting Uliana, you notice her eyes are full of a passion for truth. Uliana lived at a home deep in the mountains of Minamioguni, where she built a site-specific installation. The installation is located on the mountainside behind the house where she stayed, in the midst of a bamboo grove. Uliana built this like a small animal working away at building its dwelling, with the resulting work seeming to express some innate wild nature that we share with animals. The vermillion color stands out brilliantly amidst the natural Japanese countryside, with a direct influence from the torii gates of shrines. Uliana used organic materials and methods, and the piece seems to emit a cooling air. The location is in the corner of a piece of private property, but it may have been Uliana’s sanctuary while she was here. Take a step inside the piece, and you can nearly hear the breath of the artist as she constructed this work.

Her other work was blue. It was a performance space in which the artist acted, covered in full-body tights. Woodchips of Oguni Cedar arranged in mounds to suggest the mountains makes one recall the existence of mankind within the world. The artist may have, in the cedar chips, been remembering a scene from childhood, one filled with cedars in her home of Siberia.

These two works seem to share the themes of nature and man, and how nature allows man to live.