Context: Mono-ha

Many, if not all, my current interests and ideas can be traced back to an art movement I came across over lock-down called Mono-ha. The work I have made since then can, in many ways, be seen as an ongoing response and digestion of those ideas I started to pick over at the start of the lockdown.

Mono-ha (roughly translating to school of things) was an art movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s in Japan which rejected the Modernist idea of materials being subservient to an artist’s intention and individual expression. Mono-ha artists presented combinations of raw untreated materials through which they sought not to express their own ideas but reveal meaning in how materials already exist outside of human interaction. The works are ephemeral and not kept, restaged with new materials in a new way each time they are exhibited.

I was really attracted to the modesty inherent in Mono-ha, along with the environmental implications of finding meaning from what already exists and is around you, as opposed to created something from nothing. Discovering this movement in the midst of trying to grapple with the peculiarities of life in lockdown, I felt the sensibilities of Mono-ha really spoke to the current moment. Both in terms of our environmental crisis and the pandemic which leaves artists very limited in their resources, the ideologies of Mono-ha provided me with a rich new direction for my art and has been incredibly instrumental in making me reconsider my relationship to materials and art making as a whole.