Operating at the crossroads of furniture, graphic design and sculpture, Hisae Ikenaga makes work from everyday objects. In her works on paper, she uses cut-out images of furniture to form modular units that she then reassembles into abstract compositions. Across all the media in which she works, the artist employs collage to stage a confrontation between the common function of the items and the life of the fantastical bodies she creates from them.
The installation Untitled, halfway between an operating theatre and a cabinet of curiosities, betrays the artist’s main areas of interests. The surgeon’s tables, whose form and function have been left unaltered, appear to illustrate the artist’s own mental workings. Here, the furniture is no longer the subject of Ikenaga’s ‘surgical operations’, but appears on the contrary as an array of complicit tools in her experiments.
