Bloom Softly

Exhibited at Art Gallery of South Australia

Yoko Togashi’s (b. 1973 –) sculptures in blown, kiln-worked glass, no matter the form, point toward a beauty that is at once viscerally striking, yet are consistently imbued with a poignant gentleness that encapsulates the nature of the artist herself. Her pieces do not sparkle with radiance but glow softly, and her forms portray the beauty of glass that quietly melt away in their own silent poetry. Togashi, in fact, began her artistic debut in oil painting, having trained and debuted as a painter in the early stages of her career; it is because of this background that Togashi is able to wield glass as if she is holding a brush, quite literally painting the beauty within her mind’s eye onto not canvas but into the malleable forms of heated glass. Using the Filigrana techniques associated with Venetian glassmaking, Togashi strives to capture the beauty of glass as not a solid state but a fluid one that is in constant flux, expressing the delicate, soft, and forever-changing nature of glass as it is blown and worked in a kiln.

Direction: Gakuto Tano

Camera: Yuma Maehara
Gakuto Tano

Editing: Gakuto TANO

Production: A Lighthouse called Kanata