Keiko Miyamori’s installation invites viewers to slow down and open themselves to a quiet, reflective experience. Her work is delicate and temporary, encouraging a sense of calm and vulnerability.

Using handmade washi paper and charcoal rubbings from tree bark, she creates deeply tactile surfaces that evoke the feeling of being alone in a forest. Everyday objects—such as a typewriter wrapped in paper that resembles birch bark—are transformed through this process. They feel both familiar and strange, as if reclaimed by nature.

Some of the objects Miyamori works with are man-made, carefully covered in paper and marked with charcoal. Others are tall, tree-like forms made by combining rubbings from different tree trunks. Together, these elements explore the boundary between the natural and the artificial, and suggest a quiet harmony between the two.

The objects wear the washi like a second skin that is a metaphoric representation of an essence that links all life forms. What is transferred from object to paper is the very soul of the natural object.

-Mary Thomas

Images Of Nature

1999

The exhibition Images of Nature, held at Fox Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, was designed with human scale in mind. A chair was placed to suggest the presence of a person, highlighting the symbolic connection between human spaces and the objects within them.

Today, we enjoy a life of material abundance, yet we often forget that forests were once places of exchange.
Cutting down a tree was not only for practical use—it was also an act of connection, linking “here” with other places: the forest with the manufactured object, and the people who would one day use it.