HARUMI HAYASHI

Born in Japan, Harumi Hayashi began studying the foundations of visual art as a teenager, with plans to attend art university in Tokyo. Instead, by chance or perhaps fate, she became more of a nomad. Her life has since taken her across India, countries throughout Southern and Central Europe, Australia, and now to Hawke’s Bay, where she lives surrounded by a small menagerie of dogs, goats, horses, chickens and honey bees.

Harumi works across painting and printmaking, drawing on the accumulated memories of the places she has lived and travelled through. Her works are less concerned with depicting a particular landscape than with the way places persist in the mind: fragmented, shifting and often unexpectedly resurfacing. Her MindScope series explores these fleeting recollections: the sudden flashback of a place, a landscape or a half-remembered moment. Like looking through a kaleidoscope, fragments of memory shift and recombine, creating new and sometimes dreamlike compositions. Her printmaking practice includes carborundum and chine-collé techniques, with works printed on lokta paper.