Ocave
Faded

Exhibition opening 27th August / 16:00 - 18:00 Clocktower in the village square of Vishovgrad

Welcome to the exhibition, titled Faded, by Ocave. The exhibition is a conclusion of her artist residency at ARV.I in Vishovgrad.

Ocave told me the landscape of Vishovgrad reminds her of her surroundings in the suburbs of Tokyo. I’ve heard it before, from a guy talking about his surroundings in Costa Rica. Makes me wonder if I’ve thought the same about certain Norwegian wavy hills. What does memory do to your surroundings? We make unfamiliar surroundings into memories all the time. Is the unfamiliar what the familiar does in retrospect, the same way belonging does to uncertainty?

In Faded, Ocave’s work begins with the landscape of Vishovgrad, but the landscape is not simply transferred onto the textile. It is remade. Hills become lines. Distances become commas. A surface becomes punctuation that can be touched, crossed and returned to. Perhaps this is also how we make a landscape in our minds. To weave is also mapping. A map of decisions. A thread finds a way from one point to another. It crosses and follows something, and then leaves something out. It keeps creating relations between places that have never touched before. It doesn’t always follow a pattern. The landscape emerges gradually, not as an image, but as a collection of decisions.

What does a memory of a place do when it intervenes in a familiar place? Even to a forgotten place that hasn’t happened yet? Makes me wonder about the ability to forget something you have no recollection of. - Lars Nordby

Ocave (b. 1986, Japan) is a textile artist based in Tokyo. Drawing on small scenes encountered in everyday life and landscapes discovered while traveling, she creates textile works through weaving and stitching. She finds a connection between the gradual process of fibers coming together and the subtle changes that occur within a landscape. Like sketching the delicate shifts of light, color, and air, she seeks to preserve them within her textiles. Her works have been exhibited in Japan and internationally, including at Gallery Junbicyu (Tokyo) and Factory2 (Seoul).