福田尚代　FUKUDA Naoyo

Naoyo Fukuda takes books and stationery as her materials, and by laboriously, even obsessively applying hand embroidery and hole-piecing, creates expressions of diverse flickering meditations upon “reading” and “writing.”
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One distinctive characteristic of Fukuda’s creations, as she herself is wont to comment, “None started out as artworks.” Neither her Flotsam sculpted of worn-down erasers, nor her Winged series, folded from books she has loved since her earliest years were intended as art, but rather grew hands-on out of very intimate impulses. Eventually sudden initial breakthroughs prompted massive bursts of repetitive production until finally she herself accepted these things as proper works of her own.
Likewise, Fukuda’s materials, books and stationery and other readymade consumables, are all ordinary items yet at the same time treasured personal possessions, which by somewhat obsessive handling — carving, folding, piercing, stitching, or perhaps better said, caressing — she transforms into puzzling objects.
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Fukuda’s fingers carve, trim, puncture and unravel commonplace everyday things so as to strip away their original meanings and functions, and in the very last instant before they seem to vanish, she coaxes them into different new lives. Again and again, they are reborn. What attracts us in Naoyo Fukuda’s works is the impossibly paired coexistence of extinction by fate and the promise of regeneration.

Excerpt from KOIDE Yukiko (Director, Yukiko Koide Presents), Naoyo Fukuda graciousrainlilyparticle (Invitation text of the exhibition), Yukiko Koide Presents, Tokyo, 2013 and “Something like caressing”, Naoyo Fukuda: Works from 2001- 2013, Yukiko Koide Presents, Tokyo, 2014. (Translated by Alfred Birnbaum)