To create her works, which she calls glass pyrographs, Tokyo-born, Seattle-based artist Etsuko Ichikawa trails streams of molten glass, Jackson Pollock-like, across paper.
The resulting tendrils of ash, lacy yet fire-scarred, are both jagged and flowing. Like lightning piercing a very dry forest, the organic reaction between fire, air, and earth is elemental. Cycles of existence tracing each other – both earth that grew wood to become paper and earth that was hewn into sand and then melted into glass. It’s a molecular home-coming; the lost long relatives of stone and arbour reunited, lifetimes later, evolved into higher states, through fire.
The resulting burnt etches, smoky (literally) and lithe, are described by Ichikawa as a “continuing investigation of what lies between the ephemeral and the eternal.”
shape+colour 