Inblick / Insight
Museum of Design and Craft - Röhsska museet
2019, Göteborg
Inblick was created for the re-opening of Röhsska in 2019. The project was loosely spun from the Japanese textile object ‘Noren’ – a traditional and still common marker for an entrance in Japan. The installation sought multiple entries to the echoes of colour - here to the colour blue.
With the translucent textile part of the work, Senno creates a self reflecting initiation to the moment before or after colour. It is a physical encounter and introspection built and moulded through the artist’s own body. In this transparent mirror, one’s own bodily presence illustrates a determination of the colours we do not see but rather feel – an indefinite and undeterminable colour chart, almost as an allegory to the chameleon. In the video installation, Senno plays through shapes and structures on bodily associations, with the natural elements - or the natural elements with the body. Here she introduces blue elements as the vein containing an entrance to parallel universes of colour/non-colour, like the feeling of colour when we close our eyes towards the light.
shiro / ao
Shiro means white in Japanese and Ao means blue. The two colours long represented each other's opposites in Japanese class society. White was for a time reserved to be worn only by the Emperor and indigo blue was the worker's colour –the most permanent colour in natural dyeing technique. In the Japanese soil there is no lime, the presence of white was thus limited to times of snow or through white and albino animals and was considered divine and sacred.
Senno works with traditional craft methods and materials where she uses alum and skin glues to create surfaces and structures similar to the lime we find in our Swedish soil but also in our own bodies. Alum is used i.a. traditionally in natural dyeing and tanning of hides.
