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1. Earth baby 2. Shira - Spirit from the Wild 3. Inter-Traveller
The principle of Tomoko Konoike's art practice, which currently takes the form of paintings as well as sculpture and installations, is the idea of "play."
To date, her paintings have been characterized by depictions, to the point of perverseness, of a world where this world and the next are curiously intertwined. These paintings, although beautiful, give people a sense of dread and an impression of inaccessibility.
However, as Konoike absorbs herself in her amusing painted world, the various motifs in her paintings teach us that the cycle of life and death that transcends the individual, the very first memories from before there was civilization and the "somewhere" we were born and to which we will return are all adjacent to each other and not merely "the great beyond" separated from our own world.
Earth Baby produced in 2009 is, compared with her other installation works, exceptionally large-scale. The bizarre-looking "baby" that revolves in the center resembles the planet earth floating in outer space. At the same time, there is something abnormal about the baby, as if it was born from a swelling up of the earth. Nobody other than its mother – perhaps herself –is allowed to touch the newborn. On the other hand, the baby seems afraid of being separated from this land on which we live by the numerous ropes stretched around the earth that undulate like waves.
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