"Staying in somewhere" Drawing

Bio

Akiko Yamazaki was born in Tokyo in 1979. and she grew up in central Tokyo.
In addition, she lived in an old-fashioned bathhouse style Japanese house. She played there and loved it.
The house was demolished when she was six years old since her family moved to the suburban area of Tokyo. Yamazaki observed that her house was completely destroyed, and the demolished house was still surrounded by other buildings. These experiences have influenced her works.

Between 1998 and 2000, she studied oil painting at Shinjyuku Art School.
In 2004, she moved to London and enrolled in a foundation course in sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts (CCA) for a year. In 2007, Yamazaki obtained an MA in Drawing at CCA.
Since 2009, she has been working in Yokohama in Kanagawa prefecture (south of Tokyo).Yamazaki’s works have been displayed several times in Japan (mostly in Tokyo) at both group and solo exhibitions such as Shonandai MY gallery.
In 2010, she was selected for the book ‘Artist file Contemporary Art (published by ART BOX international INC in 2010).
In 2013, she had a solo exhibition in NYC (Ouchi gallery) and Yamazaki was chosen at Sell Art Prize.

Yamazaki has been drawing mostly by pencil for several years.
Memory, space, and time are very important essences of her works. She explores the relationship of the present and human existence with these essences. Moreover, she creates each drawing by composing the relations between our existence and essences. For instance, she usually draws contemporary ruin as forecasting past and future memory.
In other words, she draws human existence with memory, space, and time without people.
She believes that drawing is the means of exploration into her theme and also plays the function of a record that has memory and time.