Utako Shindo has continued to create immersive, contemplative bodies of work that are quiet and elegant, since she first exhibited at Sutton Projects in 2009. Shindo is interested in the poetics of (un)translatability, and semantic and material translation/transformation in art. Her recent practice largely employs the various ‘transfer’ (known as “utsuru” in Japanese, meaning reflect, project, trace, emerge and transfer) processes, manifested as drawing, print, relief, photography and video, which often together comprise an installation work. For this body of new works, she explores untranslatable elements, with works formed through cyanotype printing, plaster casting and audio/visual recording as a means to capture a “trace” of an object, place and time in her sensing ‘reminiscent of long gone by’, as she expresses:

a boxed garden 
time drifts
sheltering the growths
remains of the tree, receive
untranslatable motherhood 
may forever
her ‘Ode’ to 
the Zephyr’s murmuring petal

a cinematic architecture 
the descendant
the silent sun, the moon
as it were 
a meteorite of the earth’s shadow
still fertile 
his ‘Lament’
everything is so far and long gone by

listening to misterioso
tears and laughters sleep
over cities and highways
returning to a twinkle 
for the first time and at last