Makiko Harris

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

I am a Japanese-American artist working across sculpture, painting, film, and live performance. I take the materials of feminine labour and devotion, sewing needles, human hair, fishnet, lockets, and remake them at a scale that demands to be reckoned with. Objects associated with the domestic and the intimate, long dismissed as minor, become monumental. The needle runs through my work. It binds, mends, and pierces, and it ties me to my grandmother, who sewed, and to the long lineage of women's handcraft. I work hands on in metal, bringing in specialist fabricators when the scale demands it. My lockets are the other centre of the work: large forms in polished steel, sealed with a padlock, that open to reveal a braid of human hair on one side and a painted mirror on the other. Where a traditional locket holds a portrait of the beloved, mine hands you back your own reflection. My paintings work the same tension in a different register. Oil on canvas is built against real stainless steel netting, the body pressed into industrial mesh, fishnet treated not as provocation but as structure. Across the work, I am interested in the female body as its own subject, and in devotion as a physical act: something done with the hands, something that leaves a mark. Performance is integral rather than adjacent. My film and live work Needle Dance brought my sculptures into choreography, with rope costumes made with couture designer Deborah Milner, a score I performed on violin, and a moment...

Artwork