DENNIS POTTER
May 2013
For the past ten years I have constructed painted paper kimonos based on a model from traditional
Japanese Buddhism. This kimono, or hakui, is a simple garment worn by all Buddhist pilgrims who
circumambulate the island of Shikoku in Japan. This garment works as a metaphor for experience and
memory because it is inscribed with both printed seals and brush painted blessings and sutra, or poems
written by monks that the pilgrim visits wearing the kimono. Thus, it is a skin of the pilgrim's
experience that is transformed by art and by the experience itself. Walking the long and (historically)
treacherous path the kimono becomes worn, stained, rain washed, and layered/faded with the art works
describing the experience, attesting to the pilgrimage. My work has been reformed and focused by this
discovery and it provides me with a new, spiritual and purposeful context.My kimonos are a kind of
multicultural hybrid or "quote" of the Asian Hakui and a more painterly, Western inflected process that
is my own.
I am a mature artist with over 40 years of painting experience and feel newly freed by using the Hakui
model. It provides me with a purpose for my own work, one that implies memory and loss,
functionality, and a context that although borrowed and implausible, informs my work with
significance in the light of the pilgrim experience. I have been living in Taiwan with my Taiwanese
partner who lost his US visa as a result of 9/11 and teaching HS Art in International schools for over
two years now. Our move to Taiwan is a pilgrimage of my own. I find that my own pilgrimage in Asia
and my experience here re-constructs the images and context of the kimonos ... the actuality of living in
Asia is so different from the imaginary.
This body of work includes paper reconstructions of kimono, priest robes (Kesa) and the paintings,
prints, and drawings that eventually become Kimonos. Kesa are made by wealthy parishioners and
given to monks and priests who are not allowed to own luxury goods, so the rich fabrics of the kesa
have been cut, pieced like quilts, and remade as non-luxury, scrap, recycling. This traditional practice
of remaking art in Asia is ancient, and suggests many post-modern appropriation practices in
contemporary Art from the West. Most Japanese Kesa are gold embroidered and sumptous though some
are plain, mine are paper and cloth and brush-painted and processed as a Western painting would be.
My eventual goal is to make a show that resembles the curio cabinets of the 19th Century explorers, a
collection of these objects as signs of a hybrid faux-culture that reflects my actual experience via
appropriated forms and quirky personal processes, as does my own pilgrimage in Asia now.