At this week's Armory Show, Patel Brown Gallery (Toronto, Montreal) will present Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka with a body of work titled Rumination.
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s printed-paper textile works explore the intersections of environmental fragility, cultural resilience and mental health, drawing deeply from her personal experience living with bipolar disorder.
Developed during artist residencies at Kashiki Seishi, a family-run handmade washi paper mill in Japan, and at Black Rock in Senegal, Hatanaka’s work incorporates traditional craft techniques, of over 1000 year histories, rooted in environmental stewardship—practices that are increasingly endangered. She also brings in references to ice and water in the high arctic, where she spent a decade doing community-engaged projects.
Hatanaka works with naturally dyed, printed, and sewn Japanese handmade washi paper — some sheets imprinted with gyotaku, the traditional Japanese method of printing real fish. Several of the works in Rumination involve her signature process of sewing together hundreds of scraps of washi, in this case to create life-sized silhouettes of her own body.
In the words of curator Claire Shea, “Hatanaka’s work has turned toward exploring how climate change may also be shaping our ‘inner landscapes.’ Living with bipolar disorder, she is particularly interested in how such conditions may have evolved and why they persist. In recent years, research into the evolutionary origin of this condition suggests that it may have developed during the last Ice Age as an adaptive response to extreme climate variability, allowing for periods of shutdown or hibernation to conserve energy. She is constantly questioning what insights this condition might offer as we navigate the increasing fluctuations of today’s world.
In parallel, Hatanaka has begun to explore the changing language of emotion and pathology as a way of mapping collective psychological shifts. In Rumination (2025), she charts the steep rise in the usage of the word ‘rumination’ over time, embedding this word usage graph into a series of prints of the landscape, thus drawing a connection between inner and outer forms of instability.”
Her practice embraces marginalized forms of embodied knowledge — neurodivergent, ecological, and cultural — positioning them as essential tools for navigating and sustaining our collective future.