Yumemi Hiraki - 'Creases'

Wednesday 18 July - Sunday 12 August 2018 

“This body of work explores the invisible ties and the unraveling threads that anchor and contest her longing for the cultural past that is heavy, but is slipping away. This process brought Hiraki face to face with the burden and guilt of shedding a part of country and culture. Wherever she is, there is always a gap, a threshold, a barrier that slowly seeps into space.

Engulfed in the flame of it all, Hiraki has reached a kind of turning point, one at which this private conversation may emerge. Perhaps, being in this gap is okay. Letting things be as they are is okay. Although transformed, history remains present, perhaps you are the residue of the generations before you.

Yumemi Hiraki is a Melbourne-based artist from Hiroshima, Japan. After completing her BFA at the Victorian College of the Arts, she now continues to develop her practice whilst exhibiting in various galleries and ARIs around Victoria.

Experimenting with a wide range of materials, she explores tense relationships and subtle connotations of one as a resident of cultural gaps. Immersing her viewer in the complexity of history, memory, nostalgia and identity, Hiraki’s spatial landscaping evokes a familiar yet foreign sense of longing, belonging and holding on. Treating her practice as a personal study of life’s continuity and ephemerality, her works hint that perhaps our memories, and in turn, the way we withhold history is as dynamically transitional as this world that we all inhabit.”