Yuko Nishikawa is a Japanese born ceramic artist, based in New York. She aims to use ceramics as a medium to enhance feelings. Yuko wants to makes you feel “piku-piku”, a Japanese onomatopoeia word that refers to involuntary movements caused by accidental contact. Her mission is to make you feel “piku-piku”, which means to tickle something inside you.
1//Her background:
Yuko Nishikawa grew up in an environment that fostered creating with her hands. At 18, she moved to the USA and studied Interior Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. It was a natural step to start collaborating with Interior Design studios; mainly prototyping everyday functional objects from chairs and tables to lamps. For almost ten years, she worked for a luxurious company designing furniture and lighting. During this time, she even won two Interior Design Magazine’s Best of Year Awards.
2//Why she named her studio ‘Forest’:
She named her studio Forest, because it is a place “where things grow, and things fall feed to create new lives, where we wonder and discover something new.” At Forest, everything happens from ideation to production. After years of working using mainly straight lines, she found herself desiring to explore the opposite. She works investigating her creativity through sketches and doodles, but in the moment of making the piece, the artifact takes on to become its unique form.
Yuko Nishikawa makes all sorts of pieces with ceramics sculptures, vessels, tableware, objects. Of course, we are passionate about ceramics, but what we find fascinating is her lighting work: chandeliers in a sort of delicate dance frozen in time.
Her last solo exhibition called Nap Sculpture Space NYC in Long Island City and Yuko Nishikawa offered the possibility to somehow interact with her art. So she placed a chair, “Please seat!” she kindly asked. It is a sort of moment of meditation where the focal points that help the observer to unclutter the mind are the lights. Indeed the artist, through this collection, wanted to recreate the effect that a nap has on the body and mind when we feel relaxed and energized.
Photographer: Nico Schinco
3//Why it is so relatable:
In current days, we are constantly visually overstimulated. We search for any possible situation in which we can rest the eye and thus the mind. This need is being interpreted by several designers in different fields through products and services. Nap is not only a beautiful ceramic lighting installation but the respond of this need in the area of art, Yuko shows how she uses ceramics as a medium to enhance feelings, in this case, feelings of calm and balance.
If you’d like to see other ceramics projects that are on our wishlist, please browse over HERE.
