Japanese-born South Australian artist and 2023 Guildhouse Fellow Kyoko Hashimoto presents an exhibition of her work titled Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami), as part of her Guildhouse Fellowship. The exhibition is the culmination of a year of intensive research by the artist during a pivotal time in her life.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022, Hashimoto emerged from her treatment the following year with a desire to find an answer to a deeply personal question: ‘What is my purpose as an artist, in this world?’ The answers to her questions are both deeply personal and universal, with her exhibition imagining a more sustainable way of living, whereby the health of the human body intimately mirrors the health of the ecological world.
In the wake of her diagnosis, Hashimoto sought new non-toxic materials and moved away from the hard metals of her practice as a contemporary jeweller. Instead, she used foraged plant materials transforming them into a range of paper mâché objects or collaged into intricately patterned necklaces or sculptures.
Similarly, rocks from her garden were pounded to create paints. The imagery of her abstract paintings was inspired by the petrographic structure of those rocks, their appearance captured by microscopy at a specialist laboratory in Adelaide. The geological formation of the land on which Hashimoto works was revealed through the wafer-thin slices of rock pressed onto glass plates.
The measured design and labour-intensive endeavour of these processes, aided by her studio collaborator Guy Keulemans and captured in film by Alex Robertson, is reflected in paintings, collages and sculptures that express the unique quality of a specific place. Contemplating what she learned during the fellowship, Hashimoto observes, ‘This way of working has given me an embodied experience of an entangled nature. It brought me great satisfaction’.
The Guildhouse Fellowship is presented by Guildhouse and the Art Gallery of South Australia, with the generous support of the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation.
Event Details:
Dates: 22 Aug - 2 Nov 2025
Location: AGSA
Notes: Free entry