Yuko Nishikawa creates a fantastical environment with her colourful, textural lively forms. With a hands-on, exploratory approach, she makes paintings, lighting, mobiles and sculptures using a variety of mediums including clay, wire, fabrics, as well as repurposed materials such as recycled paper and used eyewear lenses.

Her work reflects her accumulative experiences in architecture, restoration, interior and furniture design, crafts and engineering. Growing up in a small seaside town just south of Tokyo, Japan, Nishikawa received her B.F.A. in Interior Design from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 2002. Since then, she has surveyed courthouses, hospitals and federal buildings; documented the Guggenheim Museum’s facade for the restoration project in 2008; and assisted in hospitality and residential interior design projects for some of NYC’s leading studios such as Clodagh, Bilhuber Inc. and Alexandra Champalimaud.

She currently works in her studio in the industrial area in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, which she built out with friends utilising demolished materials found in the building.

Yuko Nishikawa comments on her ‘Memory Tourist’ installation:

“Memory Tourist combines part of my recent installations with new work, whose wire forms create line drawings in the air and connect colorful and airy repurposed paper “Cookies” which move in response to us when we walk by them and stir the air. To make these Cookies, I collect used photo-background paper from artists and photographers in my Brooklyn studio building. I break it down to pulp, and formulate it with bookbinders' glue into an air-dry clay. The rich colors come directly from the colors of the donated paper; there are no added paints or pigments. I mix pulps the way I would mix paints to make additional colors and effects, by blending blue pulp and red pulp to make a purple clay, for example. Mushy pulps make homogeneous colors, while crumbly pulps have a stippled effect. Finely blended pulps form a smoother surface like macaroons while coarser pulps become bumpier like oatmeal cookies.Over the last year I made mobiles for specific times and places, first for Cape Cod in May, then next for Vermont in November, this Spring for different neighborhoods in my hometown Brooklyn, and then this Summer for San Francisco. Through my traveling for these installations I began to think of the memory of the material - the paper. It retains the colors and the fibers it originally had in these mobiles, whose elements interact with one another as they swing, recreate relationships, and then part ways, like those who visit a place for pleasure.”