Eternal Becoming - Leeay Aikawa's Portfolio

𝑬𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑩𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒈 invites you to a scene through which I attempt to encapsulate the uncanny bond I have had with the invasive Spongy Moth species for the last two years.

When unpleasantly hairy Spongy Moth caterpillars infest the local landscape, they also stir up my unconscious field. They appear everywhere and manifest as Lady Death Moth who guides me to confront my own identity as an immigrant settler, and as a member of the Earth community in the Anthropocene, teaching me about human activities that impact all aspects of ecological devastation and spiritual illness our society collectively face today.

This shifting and paradoxical perception toward Spongy Moths, from objects of aversion to that of reverence, signifies my realization that everything has ‘‘two sides of one coin.’

Birth and death, love and hate, good and evil, proliferation and decay, past and future, light and dark; these are spectrums of aspects that have allowed me to appreciate each divine moment while allowing me to understand who I am eternally becoming— constantly towards the opposite.

I dreamt up the dualistic window spaces of The J-Spot, which separates east from the west as a highly suitable tool to invite viewers to the middle ground and suggest the tension of the opposites in a form of craft-mystical installation.

The goddess/ the dreamer is lying down with the crown of her head facing north. This follows Japanese funeral customs.

𝙎𝙤𝙞𝙡: The whole body the dreamer is filled with discarded objects and covered with soil, which I collected from the Humber region. This is a place I occasionally visit alone for self-introspection and observing constant flux of the river.

𝘽𝙪𝙧𝙡𝙖𝙥: The dreamer’s hair is made with burlap, which I dyed with Japanese Sumi ink and implanted on her head one by one by hand. A burlap barrier band trap is one of the methods anyone can employ to collect spongy moth caterpillars if you want to protect your tree from being eaten.

𝙂𝙞𝙣𝙠𝙜𝙤: The dreamer wears a crown made with Willow branches and gilded Ginkgo leaves– a familiar tree to me, growing up in Japan.
It symbolizes two and one at the same time. Particularly I was inspired by German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem "Gingo Biloba."

𝘼𝙡𝙙𝙚𝙧: The dreamer wears Alder cone earrings, another hardwood tree they like to infest.

𝙎𝙤𝙞𝙡: The whole body of the dreamer is filled with discarded objects and covered with soil, which I collected from the Humber region. This is a place I occasionally visit alone for self-introspection and to observe the constant flux of the river.

pupae

Wanting to be one from two is love.

𝙋𝙞𝙣𝙚: The baby is wearing a pine-needle ornament around his neck. Over the course of the duration, I have collected pine needles continuously, sometimes from regular streets. Pine is native to the northern hemisphere including Canada and Japan, my homeland. Though Spongy Moth larva usually feeds on hardwood, in case of extreme infestation, they eat on softwood and evergreens such as pine and spruce. Pine, for this reason, represents the scale of the outbreak in the last 2-3 years.

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