Born in 1983 in Japan, Natsuko Uchino graduated from Cooper Union in New York in 2007. Her journey is shaped as much by agricultural and rural experience as by the reinvestment of traditional techniques in a sensitive and learning-oriented exploration.
Working with clay is one of the entry points into her work. It highlights a commitment of the gesture through time, seeking to build an original path in the face of the accelerating mechanical and digital transformation of production and subsistence methods.
Natsuko Uchino thus develops a cross-disciplinary practice between art and ecology. Through a holistic approach to art, she revisits the history of techniques and « savoir-faire », subverting hierarchies between disciplines. In doing so, she aims to reacquaint herself with the manufacturing, transformation and assembly processes associated with craftsmanship and vernacular techniques.
For her first solo exhibition in a French museum institution, Natsuko Uchino intertwines narratives within spaces. More than a simple homage to the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, «Fiction Theory Basket» sketches a way of inhabiting the world between the permanence of gestures and secular knowledge, the political ecology of reuse, and the experimentation of matter.
Natsuko Uchino lives and works in Belvézet (Gard). She is coordinator of the Art and Geo-Materials (MAGMA) Master’s program at ESAD TALM – Le Mans. Natsuko Uchino is represented by Galerie Allen (Paris) and Sorry We Are Closed (Brussels).
