Fumino Hora Sculptures: Fumino Hora

September, 2003 HONG KONG---Recently honoured by being the recipient of the Philippe Charriol Foundation 17th Annual Art Competition-second runner-up, September 2002 and having just graduated from the Art Centre’s Bachelor of Fine Arts awarded by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, artist Fumino Hora shows her work her sculpted “fiber art pieces” at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery from September 18th-October 18th 2003.

Fumino Hora has taken inspiration from Japanese Hina Dolls to explain her struggle and questions about female identity. Hina Matsuri, or Girls’ Festival, is celebrated each year on the third of March in Japan. Parents display a set of dolls to wish for their daughters' happiness.

This festival first originated around 1,000 years ago in the Heian Period (794-1192). It is a traditional to display ceremonial dolls on tiers of shelves covered in scarlet material. These dolls are dressed in the fashion of the people of the ancient palaces. The Emperor and Empress and courtiers displayed on tiered shelves in hopes of their daughters’ future of a good and luxurious life. It is said that if the parents are slow in putting out the dolls, the daughters will have trouble marrying off their daughters.

Fumino, being a Japanese woman, asks herself “What is the ideal of a woman’s happiness?” Is it to live in a deluxe house and to wear beautiful clothes? Or is it to serve their husbands and bring up their children? Is it to obey the family tradition without showing their inner “self”? Her works deal with the theme of woman’s ideal image and the perfection that Japanese women are expected to have, as well as its contrary--how much boundary and restraint that women are pushed to have.

Fumino through her Hina sculptures delves into the theme of female identity by exploring the strength, vulnerability, flexibility, sensitivity, sexuality and spirituality of women, through their culture, history and religion. Fabric has been the media that she frequently uses. Fabric is an ideal media to represent “female” because of its contradictory nature; strength and vulnerability, permanence and flexibility. For this series of work “Hina”, she uses metal (brass), for the same reason. Metal can be surprisingly soft and flexible, but it is so, in a much more stronger and permanent way compared to fabric. Metal mesh is soft and it looks beautiful, you can fold it and sew it as if it were fabric, but if you treat it in a wrong way, it can cut like blade. I have felt the metaphor of the nature of women in metal.

Upon the brass plates attached to the robes are transferred photographs of Fumino’s family images and history. “People in the photographs bring me a feeling of nostalgia to my own roots and culture.