A Warm Glow to Remember
Wherever I am, there is always a gap. A threshold. A barrier that seeps into space.
A Warm Glow to Remember is a transitional journey that explores Yumemi’s relationship to Japanese heritage and tradition. It is a series of intimate metaphors that articulate the process of reconciling her place within cultural gaps that accompany the migrant experience. It is an act of closeness as much as it is an act of letting go.
This work explores Yumemi’s feelings of incompetency, loss, burden, and guilt that arise when a part of country and culture is shedded whilst simultaneously grasping at the invisible ties that anchor identity. Longing for a cultural past, we try to hold onto these cultural threads as they unravel and slip and feel increasingly far away.
How do you position yourself in an international setting while carrying the responsibility of maintaining cultural authenticity?
How can someone honour heritage between the tension of longing and letting go?
Attempting to come face to face with these raw emotions she found resonance in the glass casting process.
Engulfed in the flame; her manifesting thoughts, the burning fabric and the radiating glow from the liquid glass, Yumemi found an unexpected turning point, one in which this private conversation began to emerge.
Perhaps being in this gap is okay.
That letting things be as they are, is okay.
Although transformed, history remains present.
We are forever the residue of the generations before us.
The glass sculptures are created through a process of hot glass casting, encompassing a piece of Obi silk within. The patterns that remain in the glass as a result, are the burnt remains of the fabric, trapped within the glass surfaces.