Yuki Aruga

ARTIST STATEMENT
Informed by personal experiences and mixed Japanese-British heritage, my practice addresses notions of loss, longing and identity // I draw inspiration from nature as well as Japanese and European still life paintings and religious iconography of the 16th-18th century. The works combine the traditional and the contemporary by adopting techniques of the Old Masters to create paintings from digitally rendered collages // My paintings often feature dark, expansive spaces in which subjects are held unfathomably suspended, alluding to the idea of the void and the numinous. More recent sculptures in wax and clay, and installations using paper, rice and soil, are symbolic of legacy, desire and rebirth // Materially the works are often part of a Western tradition, while conceptually they are rooted in Eastern philosophy and Japanese aesthetic principles. Almost as a metaphor for my mixed-race heritage, the works lie somewhere between; between abstraction and figuration, the real and the virtual, East and West, presence and absence.