Proposal Abstract

Presenting new works 2019-2020 from a two-year funded research fellowship in the printmaking department at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Rouse collected traces of her Tokyo environment in the form of urban texture frottages, taxonomy drawings of unwanted curbside plants, vernacular typography, and salarymen on public transport. Her sustained method of collection generated a large pool of images that situated the artist in space and time—a language of the critical locality. Born in the UK, Rouse has lived in Tokyo for more than a third of her life.

Using the fundamentally transformative and deformative language of print, this situated syntax was combined and repeated, as an unstable grammar that points to new meanings. The work reflects the artist’s experience of crossing geographical boundaries, but also a discombobulated life, inhabiting multiple identities across communities, as well as the virtual borderlands between digital and analogue. Traditional mokuhanga printing encounters digital reconfigurations, amassing and retreating through each subsequent reinterpretation.