The Velvet Purple series of works on paper.
"Throughout my artistic career, my primary focus has been the issue of identity, in which individuals are categorised for what they are and how they function in maintaining economic machinery. In the process of exploring my essential discomfort against such social conditions, I started the act of cutting papers." - Sachiko Abe.
Since 2004, Sachiko Abe has been performing Cut Papers throughout the world. The work has explored regimes of subjectivity and cultural impositions in a series of immersive performative and large scale sculptural works. In these acts the artist creates a surplus of material and meaning within an apparently simple aesthetic economy and it is this scenic space of production that invites interpretation. The works of Sachiko Abe are durational and irrational, created through repetitions that seem to be an act of eternal revenge on a blank page and the stories excluded from a simple white A4 sheet.
This biographical text sliced together between quotation marks silences the noisy debris of discourse. The work of art cuts up everything and leaves relics of significance in it’s place. With the history of performance these issues become complex, the artist creates possibilities for an audience to loose the artwork in an effort to perceive it.
In addition to the public performances of Cut Papers, Sachiko Abe works in solitude for many hours creating intensive drawn topographic landscapes that have the qualities of endoscopic visions, inviting the viewer to contemplate an intimate cartography created in states parallel to that of automatic drawing. An intuitive moving of the line that explores the hypnotic power of repetition and the iteration of industry.