Keiko Machida

“The idea of hybridisation informs Keiko Machida’s work, which relies on a fusion of the mineral, vegetal, animal, and human realms. By presenting nature as an indiscernible whole, the artist repositions her incarnations and transformations on a mythological and cosmogonical scale. Hybridisation also entails creative deformity and artificiality: measures and proportions become warped, an enormous head sits atop a frail body, colours appear faded or, on the contrary, saturated. Ceramics, which the artist experiments with as if it were a drawing opened out in space, is the most significant expression of this approach. The cooking process makes the alterations of the material even more visible, which she accentuates through the use of metallic oxides and enamels. The staging of hybrid or misshapen creatures and distraught or crippled figures from dreamlike or apocalyptic worlds becomes the starting point of gripping micro-fictions.

Excerpt from a text by Eveline Notter and Thierry Maurice, 2018
Translated by Lucy Pons, 2019