Throughout history the human body and the female anatomy in particular troubled many thinkers who analysed them from the intellectual, political or psychological perspectives, often focusing their attention on speculations about the mind/body dualism. As ordinary people, we usually take the contours or boundaries of our bodies for granted, approaching such subjects with less intensity than educated thinkers, but that's certainly not the case with Ayako Matsumura.
The Japanese artist and textile designer refuses to banally inhabit the skin or assume that the skin just cloaks the body. So, rethinking about the way our skin materialises around the body, she created tapestry-looking body suits that perfectly reproduce human forms. Matsumura's pieces also hint at the fact that the skin exposes the body rather than just containing it.
Born in Kyoto in 1987, Matsumura first studied art at high school in Mie. "After that I studied pattern and design at the fashion school in Osaka, and then moved onto textile art," she recounts.
Experimenting with textiles, she created tapestries reproducing faces or parts of the body, before developing her iconic body suits showcased as part of her "Try It On" project. "I made them using a technique called Tsuzureori, employing cotton yarns," she explains about her pieces that, hanging from the ceiling or the walls of a gallery during exhibitions and events, quite often prompt in the viewers dual feelings of attraction and repulsion as the works end up being boundary objects allowing the contours of the body to appear as clearly as possible.
"A previous event, 'Outgrow', featured pieces I made when I was an undergraduate. But after my graduation I felt like I wanted to know more about people's reaction to my works," the artist says. "I consider myself as a textile artist: living and weaving are the same for me; I'm fascinated by the action of weaving itself and I also like fashion. So I decided to put the body suits on and walk around in them. It was then that I noticed people reacted positively to the pieces."
Rather than being simple garments or banal works of art, Matsumura's body suits reshift the focus on women's marginalisation in society, elevating the skin to armour while hinting at issues such as identity and subjectivity. The artist promises she will be exploring further issues connected to fashion and the body.
"At the moment I'm a research fellow at Seian University, but I'll keep on working on my pieces and refining my technique. I'm making new works for the next exhibition, thinking about the action of putting clothes on, which means I'm thinking about life," Matsumura concludes.
All images in this post courtesy Ayako Matsumura
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