Naohiro Maeda
My work integrates photography and embroidery, creating unique pieces that deconstruct and reconstruct landscape imagery. I capture photos during car journeys, often with my partner driving. I then digitally manipulate these raw images, employing excessive image correction tools until they lose their single vanishing point. Once the digital manipulation is complete, I print the images on matte photo paper and begin an intricate process of hand embroidery. This step involves making hundreds of white knots on the inkjet print surface, a technique inspired by Sashiko, a traditional Japanese embroidery method used to mend and reinforce garments.
My work is deeply influenced by my experiences of living in different countries, such as Alaska and Germany, and reflects the quiet comfort of displacement and not knowing how life unfolds. Through those practices, I explore the unreliable narrative as an immigrant, as someone alien to a new territory.
These images have been developed during this GlogauAIR residency program and Picture Berlin. They were selected for group exhibitions at Dodomu Gallery and F-Stop Magazine.
I will keep exploring my practice of reconstructing landscapes with photography and embroidery, and try larger paper sizes and adding more mediums of drawings and paintings.