Katherine H Kodama
Much of my work reflects experiences with places which include Hawaii, Iceland, Scotland/Wales (seaweed), and trees posing in “nature”. During the Covid19 sheltering in place, I was floundering in my art practice. I needed to keep busy so I made hundreds of masks before the availability of commercial masks was common. I needed to be focussed on working with my hands and my mind but didn’t feel like painting. It seemed trivial and unimportant. I came across a Matisse cutouts online course given by the London Drawing Group and found great comfort in the simplicity of cutting paper. I began spending hours cutting up a free, glossy magazine that really irritated me. The fancy cars, watches, and expensive lifestyle seemed very trivial, ridiculous and in bad taste considering we were in a pandemic. This led me to question my response and how to make it positive. I took the most offensive articles and advertisements and, inspired by Matisse’s later work, made cutouts of seaweed. I always had a fondness for seaweed both eating and enjoying their morphology. Because of this practice, I began painting again, and returned to the Iceland series.
