Hitoko Okada: Setsubun - sacred offerings to the divine divide

Curated by Karly Boileau 

With a focus on a slow-making process through a Japanese heritage craft practice, Hitoko Okada’s major solo exhibition explores new ceramic and textile works that critically engage with and question the global fashion supply chain as it relates to colonial histories of fast fashion. Her works draw inspiration from geological processes and metabolic evolution of fungi, to apply ancestral knowledge in a present-day context to re-imagine futurisms and ways of being through a queer lens. 

Setsubun is an annual festival that has its roots in Shinto, marking the seasonal divide from Winter to Spring in the Japanese lunar calendar. 


 

Hitoko Okada would like to acknowledgement the community of folks who were integral to the research and creation of works for this exhibition: Lisa Picone. Ishii-san, Takayuki at Awonoyoh; Russ Ohrt and Julia Hitchcock of Backyard Harvest for supporting my learning of growing indigo; Suzanne Carte, Heather Kuzyk, and Michelle Lynn at the Art Gallery of Burlington for supporting the ceramic seed pod production; Christine Gruppe, Sally MacKay, and Kim Solga for supporting “Butch Raku” at the Dundas Valley School of Art;  Dan Schmalz at the City of Cambridge Archives; Ocean Legacy for the reclaimed ocean bound plastic pellets; and Surfrider Canada and A Greener Future for their support for this project and donations of recovered nurdles from their community beach clean-ups. 

Okada also gratefully acknowledges the support of The City of Hamilton, The Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Hitoko Okada is a queer, Nikkei, interdisciplinary artist, craft researcher and independent arts organizer, currently based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her studio research and fashion practice explore Japanese folk heritage textile crafts as archives of ancestral knowledge within the context of geo-political histories and labour of the fashion supply chain. Okada has participated in various artist residencies and exhibited widely including Canada, USA and Japan. She has received multiple grants, and awards, and has curated, programmed and delivered multiple artistic programs and exhibition projects in Vancouver, BC and around the region of Hamilton, Ontario. She currently serves on the Arts, Culture, and Education committee for the National Association of Japanese Canadians. After 2 decades of artistic, social and fashion practice, Okada is pursuing a graduate degree at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, in Vancouver, Canada.