Kyoko Hashimoto: Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami)
Art Gallery of South Australia
22 August – 2 November 2025
Japanese-born South Australian artist and 2023 Guildhouse Fellow Kyoko Hashimoto presents an exhibition of her work titled Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami), as part of her Guildhouse Fellowship. The exhibition is the culmination of a year of intensive research by the artist during a pivotal time in her life.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022, Hashimoto emerged from her treatment the following year with a desire to find an answer to a deeply personal question: ‘What is my purpose as an artist, in this world?’ The answers to her questions are both deeply personal and universal, with her exhibition imagining a more sustainable way of living, whereby the health of the human body intimately mirrors the health of the ecological world.
In the wake of her diagnosis, Hashimoto sought new non-toxic materials and moved away from the hard metals of her practice as a contemporary jeweller. Instead, she used foraged plant materials transforming them into a range of paper mâché objects or collaged into intricately patterned necklaces or sculptures.
Similarly, rocks from her garden were pounded to create paints. The imagery of her abstract paintings was inspired by the petrographic structure of those rocks, their appearance captured by microscopy at a specialist laboratory in Adelaide. The geological formation of the land on which Hashimoto works was revealed through the wafer-thin slices of rock pressed onto glass plates.
The measured design and labour-intensive endeavour of these processes, aided by her studio collaborator Guy Keulemans and captured in film by Alex Robertson, is reflected in paintings, collages and sculptures that express the unique quality of a specific place. Contemplating what she learned during the fellowship, Hashimoto observes, ‘This way of working has given me an embodied experience of an entangled nature. It brought me great satisfaction’.
Place-based making and critically engaged craft, I believe, can develop solutions to ecological harm, but perhaps more consequentially, serve as a provocation that prompts public debate about the ethical perplexities of local versus global resource extraction. By attending to the senses, the objects I create reframe and revalue the natural resources of the earth, so that we might imagine a more sensitive and sustainable future.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Kyoko Hashimoto is a Japanese-born artist living on Kaurna Country in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. Working across critical and experimental craft and design, Kyoko advocates for new kinds of sensory engagement with materials and positions her work as tools to examine human relations to ecology. Expanding upon her practice as a contemporary jeweller, Kyoko’s work includes paintings, sculpture and video installation addressing ethical and aesthetic challenges to the paradigms of material use in art, craft, design and industry.
Kyoko has an MFA from UNSW Art and Design and has exhibited widely across Australia and overseas, including the UK, Japan, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and the US. Her work is in permanent collections at National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia and Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. In 2021, together with her collaborator Guy Keulemans, she was named one of Top 100 Game Changers in design by Architectural Digest, Italy, and in 2022, won the Waterhouse Natural Science and Art Prize. They are represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Sydney.
Images (L-R): Kyoko Hashimoto, Paper Chain for the Mountain, video still, video by Alex Roberson; Kyoko Hashimoto, photograph Carine Thévenau
