Noriko Nakamura is a Melbourne based artist who uses stone carving and organic elements to make installations drawing on ideas of animism and ritualistic practices. Previous bodies of work have consisted of hand carved limestone sculptures with plants. The shapes of the sculptures represented the sun, the moon and human. Nakamura experiments with the transformational potential of materials in order to explore the relationship that exists between humans and the material world.

The current exhibition Motherland is influenced by Japanese mythology and how Japan was created. During her resent residency in Japan Nakamura visited some shrines which worship Izanami, the goddess of both creation and death, leading her to create this personal response to the Kojiki tale, the oldest existant chronicle in Japan. The Kojiki is a collection of mythologies starting from the creation of the deities and the lands and continuing through until historical references around 630BC. The gods Izanami and Izanagi appear in “Kuniumi”, the birth of Japan, which is the traditional history of the Japanese archipelago as narrated in the Kojiki. As a Japanese-born person who has been living in Australia for the past 14 years, Motherland is a way of reconnecting with her own cultural heritage.