Artist Statement

World of Resonance

“Motor resonance” is a term in infant psychology. For example, if a mother talks to a baby with a smile, the baby smiles as well. If the mother is frustrated and looks displeased, the baby will frown and eventually start to cry.

A baby resonates as they voluntarily synchronize to the mother, repeatedly imitates facial expressions and gestures, and even grasps the fundamental human emotions in doing so. An innocent baby has a natural potential to grow as they attain, with ease, everything there is to become a person. That potential is the possibility all human beings are born with.

In the collaboration with Max Ernst’s Natural History (Histoire Naturelle), the Mother is Ernst, the great master of surrealism, and I am the baby who resonates with the Mother’s facial expressions and gestures. The immense landscape and enigmatic creatures the Mother shows me accelerate the speed at which my artworks expand, an invitation toward the Cosmo. The literary association described by the Mother transforms my inner experience and makes me repeatedly speak prophecies.

When we consider all phenomena in reality to be the Mother, then artists are the babies who imitate them. Ernst explored many methods to do just that throughout his life, one of which is Frottage, a technique of copying the surface of a material, such as wood or cloth, by rubbing a pencil against the paper placed over the material. I, too, confront the diverse and complex phenomena of reality using different mediums, such as watercolor, ceramics, synthetic resin, lacquer, and cloth, as I imitate, resonate, and reach for its origin to create.

These artworks, conceived through such motor resonance with reality, subconsciously reflect primal human thoughts and desires, like an infinity mirror. In this landscape, there exists a world that’s filled with hopes and possibilities that transcend reality: the potential that emerges out of the smallest impetus, human impulse, and our courage. That is what I call “World of Resonance.”

Yumiko Furukawa

Overview

The installation piece titled World of Resonance is a collaboration with Max Ernst’s Natural History (Histoire Naturelle), which is housed in Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art. Ernst’s series of frottage gave Furukawa the impression that his work prophesized the current situation of Fukushima. Fukushima is Furukawa’s hometown. In this exhibition, Furukawa showed us the process in which she repainted the scenery of her hometown in her memory through Ernst’s work.