CAVES is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Aisha Hara.
Green Age is an exhibition of paintings that respond to a book of tanka poetry ‘Sakura Pure Land’ and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Green Fuse’. In a process of translating tanka poems by my grandmother, I access her use of the transient symbols of spring and how time passes and consumes. Similarly, in Dylan Thomas’s poem, the green fuse is the flower’s stem that fuels the growth of life and its ultimate death.
The works are punctuated by images of flora in the streets surrounding my grandparents’ neighbourhood in Yokohama. Mundane potted plants and stone paths are cropped and obscured through an artificial palette and abstract marks. In this process, potential images appear. Cracks in pavements are likened to stars and flowers like butterflies. Walter Benjamin, in The Task of the Translator, describes translation as a tangent line that touches a circle before extending into infinity. I consider my painting process to operate in a similar way. They touch the edges of inherited narratives, only to fragment into the material slippage of colour and mark. It is an impossible task to translate poetry. However, there is still a pleasure in prodding at something of the past and letting it have an afterlife.
Aisha Hara is a Japanese-Australian visual artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. Hara is interested in the intersections of painting and translation, her works begin by looking at text and drawing. By finding touch points within poetry the work then takes on its own trajectory of mark-making. Aisha has exhibited locally and in Japan. She is currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Monash University.