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. 

The artist would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council of the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Hamilton. 

Hitoko Okada is a queer, Nikkei, interdisciplinary artist, craft researcher and independent arts organizer. Her work explores how the colonial histories, labour and geopolitics of the garment supply chain impacted Japanese socio-culture as it relates to heritage textile folk crafts and the ancestral knowledge inherent within them. She has deepened her research at various artist residencies including Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine, USA; Kawashima School of Textiles in Kyoto, Japan; Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada; The Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, Canada; and Metropolitan Fukujusou AiR, in Kyoto, Japan. Okada has publicly presented across Canada, the United States of America and Japan. She is a recipient of multiple grants and awards including Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Hamilton City Enrichment Fund and Hamilton City Arts Award. Okada has curated multiple artistic projects, programs and exhibitions since 2010 in Hamilton and region. She is a co-founder and organizer for the Art Installers Alliance to art installers and independent contracted arts workers. She has volunteered for five seasons at Backyard Harvest Urban Organic Farms in Hamilton, Ontario; and will commence an MFA research project on Japanese heritage textile crafts and histories of fast fashion at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, in Vancouver, Canada.