Resident: Maki Umehara: Japan – Scotland Exchange

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is excited to announce that Maki Umehara the artist selected to represent TOKAS  in the final stage of the Scotland/Japan Residency exchange has arrived in Edinburgh this month. She will be in residence at ESW for three months between April and June developing a series of new works.

Maki Umehara has been working outside of Japan since 1999. She has become interested in the idea of “moving”, specifically observing the interaction between working, the context of artworks; and the experience of the works with heterogeneous elements. By linking various elements, she composes “passing points”,  installations and interventions that are connected with art history and art networks.

During the residency she will use fragments of archives in the local context as material to explore through installation, narratives of herself as a woman, Japanese, and other . Through Fiction Archive Centre she will present the past, present, and future in daily life and suggest a new perspective. 

Maki Umehara is a visual artist born in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. She is currently based in Aichi. She received master’s degrees from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Meisterschüler of Rita McBride) and Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and a PhD in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on collaborations in regard to certain publicly visible projects and how they developed into archives.

Selected exhibitions include ‘Nakanojo Biennale’, group, Nakanojo, JP, 2019. ‘Pola Museum Annex 2012’, group, Pola Museum Annex, Tokyo, 2012. ‘A Festival of Choices’, solo, Gallery Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam, 2012. ‘Sport in Art’, group, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, Shanghai, other venues in China, 2007-2008. 

You can find out more about her work here

Image: Mediated Landscape, 2012, silkscreen printing, wood, fabrics. Courtesy the artist

Between 2019 and 2022 Cove Park, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) and Hospitalfield have been collaborating with a number of partners in Japan (AITTOKAS and ARCUS project) to deliver a new residency exchange programme for artists, makers/designers and curators based in Scotland and in Japan. This programme, supported by British Council Scotland and Creative Scotland, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, takes place over two years, marking the British Council’s UK/Japan 2019/2020 Season of Culture and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) is an arts center dedicated to the creation and promotion of contemporary artistic expression from Tokyo, and supports a wide spectrum of artistic activities including crossover and experimental projects. Established in 2001 its mission is to provide ongoing support for emerging and mid-career artists, promote creative international cultural exchange and offer support for cutting-edge and experimental creative projects.

click here for more information about TOKAS