Hitomi Murakami’s ceramic sculptures are enchanting, beautiful, strange, and repulsive all at once. The mysterious figures appear encrusted with barnacles, invested with a texture and a living detail that make them marvelously tactile. These simultaneously otherworldly and corpse-like female forms express decay, damage or lack of wholeness, metamorphosis, often being entwined with plant life and containing cavities within themselves – a sense of visceral interiority exposed to the ruthlessness of the outer world (and our gaze). They are cloven, rent, hollowed out, and seemingly in the process of being overtaken by overflowing flora and botanical forces. With their slightly grotesque beauty and air of corrupt sacredness, they evoke mythological metamorphoses, cycles of death and rebirth, the archetypal mother, and explore themes of void and transcendence. The mermaid below with the graceful suffering of her pose and expression reminds me of an Anatomical Venus. I feel as if Murakami’s works convey either an exquisite pain or a wondrous transformation, ambiguously portraying these enigmatic, lovely beings in such a way that we never know how much of joyful growth or of wrenching sorrow is in their makeup.
