Niho Kozuru
Born in Fukuoka, Japan . Received an M.F.A. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI , and a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. Lives and works in Boston, MA.
Recent solo exhibitions at Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston, MA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Springstep, Medford, MA ; New England BioLabs, Ipswich, MA; and Arden Gallery, Boston, MA.
Participated in group exhibitions at Red Dot Art Fair, Miami, FL; The Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Fitchburg Art Museum , Fitchburg, MA ; Museum of American Glass, Millville, NJ; and Fukuoka City Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan.
Niho Kozuru has long experimented with materials and techniques, in the past producing small cast glass sculptures that were elegant and enigmatic and fit comfortably in the hand or on a table top. More recently, she began to work with a new material – rubber – taking casts of architectural and botanical details and then combining those parts to create new sculptural forms consisting of positive shapes and negative voids. The rubber’s appealing, textured, gelatinous surfaces look almost edible, and the rich hand-dyed colors of amber, red, yellow, and green add to the sculptures’ seductive qualities, which are further enhanced when light passes through them.
Kozuru’s innovation lies in her ability to change the physical material of a form and therefore its meaning. Decorative architectural elements, industrial machine parts, and forms found in nature take on new interpretations as they become part of the artist’s vocabulary; enshrined, preserved, and transformed into something truly different.
-Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Director of Curatorial Affairs
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Transplanted from Japan to Massachusetts, my formative years were spent living in an 1847 farm house amid the architecture and objects of Colonial America. My interest in New England architectural ornaments and their cultural transplantation was triggered years later when as a graduate student in Hawaii, I visited the Mission House Museum, whose structure mirrored my childhood home; it had been transported from Boston to Honolulu in pieces in 1821.
The Rising Column and Amber Finial Scape, cast in translucent colored rubber, give tribute to New England turned wood forms. They capture and allow a refraction of light, thus exposing the interior of both object and cultural memory.
Liquid Sunshine is an exploration of forms and an investigation of turning techniques, including turned wood, spun metal, and thrown ceramic. My use of turned wood recalls wheel-thrown ceramics and recalls my family history, as I am descended from generations of Japanese ceramists.
-Niho Kozuru
Image: Niho Kozuru, Liquid Sunshine (detail), 2008, cast rubber, dimensions variable, Lent by Artist
