LEIKO IKEMURA

The viewer enters the garden on the ground floor, where three sculptures are nestled in an undulating field of green stone. Ikemura’s central and imposing Rocket Girl (2024) squats menacingly, being at once a symbol of chaotic, destructive forces, but also a figure for protective good, here guarding the two cat-like statues of Miko and Mikolina in the corner. Existing between genders and species, these three bronzes are also seemingly emerging from their terrain, sculpted through the primordial energy of the earth.

A sense of prehistoric time also bubbles up from the inky depths of a lake in the nearby painted Nightscape (2024), while upstairs the twilit garden flowers into daytime with pink blooms in a suite of rose-tinted canvases and gesture-filled fields of marks that coalesce into magical, light-filled landscapes, punctuated by Ikemura’s cascading haikus in Japanese script. These poems have been translated into English below, running right to left from the doorway.

dawn light

sleeping / I have become quite an isolated island

drifting aimlessly like flotsam

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time isn’t something to be struck

numbers racing by at incredible speed / the dizzying whirl

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being alone / the swaying

play of shadow and light

perhaps I can delight in it

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people fade away faintly

changing everything / ruins of things tumble

light lingering

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the bonds between people break unstoppable

darkness or light

then what comes after that?

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vanishing into / such forms and air / everyday things

rhododendrons blooming in the garden

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only the echoes of life’s voices remain

the tenderness of that withered flower

Courtesy Lisson Gallery.