In Praise of Hands
JAPAN SEASON 2021
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the
future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
23rd November 2021, 1pm
In Praise of Hands – Online premiere
Artist, Naoko Matsubara in conversation with Dr Clare Pollard, Ashmolean Museum, poet, Penny Boxall, and Professor Wes Williams, Humanities (French).
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rdVejd32NZs
Over many decades, artist Naoko Matsubara has been working on a series of woodcuts exploring the human hand — engaged in sport, dance, music, prayer or a variety of creative acts. This in-conversation celebrates an artistic collaboration between Naoko Matsubara and prize-winning poet Penny Boxall, who has responded to the woodcuts in a series of short poems. The In Praise of Hands exhibition is available to view at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford until 13 March 2022. For more information and to book free tickets please visit the museum's website.
Follow the link to the In Praise of Hands – Gallery.
Biographies:
Naoko Matsubara grew up in Kyoto and studied design at the Kyoto City University of Arts. There she was introduced to printmaking by her teacher, the Austrian artist Felice Rix, who encouraged students to apply their tools directly to the woodblock rather than producing a preliminary sketch. Further inspired by encounters with the great print artist Munakata Shikō, Matsubara has used this method throughout her career, enjoying the dynamism and spontaneity it brings to her woodcuts.
After graduation in 1960, Matsubara pursued an MFA at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. During the following years, she studied at the Royal College of Art in London and worked as an assistant to the woodcut artist and print historian Fritz Eichenberg before settling in Oakville, Ontario in 1972. Matsubara also works in the mediums of painting, collage and paper sculpture, and is fascinated by the book as a form of artistic expression; she is currently working on her twenty-second book.
Penny Boxall is the author of Ship of the Line, which won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018). She has completed a new collection, Lights Out, with support from the Authors' Foundation and New Writing North.
In 2019 she was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, and she has held residencies at Hawthornden Castle, Chateau de Lavigny and Gladstone's Library. She has worked for museums including the Ashmolean, the Royal Collection, the Wordsworth Trust and the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall. She is currently the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of York.
Clare Pollard is Curator of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean and an associate member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. After gaining her doctorate at Oxford University on the subject of Japanese ceramics, she worked as Curator of the East Asian Collections at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin and Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, before returning to Oxford in April 2006. Her research has focused mainly on Meiji era decorative arts, and her publications include Master Potter of Meiji Japan: Makuzu Kozan (1842–1916) and his Workshop (2003) and Threads of Silk and Gold: Ornamental Textiles from Meiji Japan (2012).
In recent years she has developed a series of exhibitions and catalogues of the Ashmolean’s Japanese print collections, including Hiroshige – Landscape, Cityscape; Plum Blossom & Green Willow: Japanese surimono poetry prints; and Lifelines, celebrating the work of Naoko Matsubara. She also co-curated the Ashmolean’s current temporary exhibition Tokyo: Art & Photography with Lena Fritsch.
Wes Williams is the Director of TORCH, Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, and also a Fellow in Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall.
His main research interests are in the field of Renaissance studies; the critical study of genre and subjectivity; and the intersection of theory and practice in the literary, political, religious, and professional cultures of the early modern period. He also works on contemporary theory and film.
Find out more about the Japan 2021 – Humanities Cultural Programme here.
Credit: ‘Flute’ by Naoko Matsubara - permission from Dr Clare Pollard, The Ashmolean Museum.
