In front of Adler Planetarium in Chicago
ABOUT
BIO
Yuka Okane Inoue was born and raised in a suburb of Tokyo. She started her career in the pharmaceutical industry and developed as professional. She eventually realized her true passion and potential rested elsewhere: expressing her imagination and creativity by making art. After moving to the United States, Yuka began taking metalsmithing classes at a public college. Over several years, she explored design and processes to create three-dimensional objects using metals. Yuka produces contemporary objects through the implementation of traditional raising, forming, and fabrication techniques. She continues her studies at a local art center and developed her own body of work, strongly influenced by her Japanese culture. Throughout the years she has received international, national and local awards recognizing her achievement as an artist.
STATEMENT
My mother used to teach Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arrangement. As a child, probably as young as three to five years old, I loved watching her put various flowers and plants together to create a small, beautiful self-contained world. I would see a scene, a season, and sometimes a wind flowing through flowers in the arrangements. This is how I inherited an appreciation for the delicate balance of nature - color, size, materials and space - the transient life in a vase representing heaven, earth and human.
My mother passed away suddenly in a manner that terrified me; this huge loss left me with regrets for what I had wanted to do for her, but could not. Since then I have been searching for a way to connect with her again. I started to see that my art could be the way to express my love and pain. I found that my objects, could be a three-dimensional canvas, reflecting the world, from the ground to the sky, reaching up to and connecting with her.