Catalogs & Prints Section
Inquiry catalyzes the creative process, in the arts and in the sciences. Theory melds with imagination, culminating in conclusion then often provoking further investigation. As an artist, Seiko Tachibana (Japanese, b. 1964) ceaselessly inquires and restlessly continues to investigate. With the fertile, expansive mindset of Leonardo da Vinci and the delicate sensibilities of Emily Dickinson, Tachibana observes natural phenomena, extracts their essentials, then attempts to align the microcosm with the macrocosm. In her words:
“I create works in which elements function like organic building blocks: atoms form a molecule, molecules form a compound, compounds form a cell, cells form an organism, and so on. The marks, lines, shapes, colors, and textures that are the basic language of my work form a kind of network structure—a system of interconnected nodes that seem energized by their interaction within the network. In the interdependence, synergy, and the flow of meaning and significance within these networks, there is subtle and profound beauty.”
Born in Osaka, Japan, Tachibana completed her Masters of Art Education at Kobe University in 1993. She went on to receive an MFA at San Francisco Art Institute in 1995 and continues to reside in the Bay Area. Her stylistic and technical maturation intertwines rather than reconciles cultural duality. Reductive and intricate, Tachibana’s work threads Asian tradition with a modernist aesthetic. Through a self-professed search for unifying principles, she explores shape, color, and spatial relationships as vehicles for that quest.
Tachibana’s search towards synthesis spawned a fascination with fractals; as she describes, “patterns repeated all around us in structures microscopic to galactic;” nature’s covert geometry, bespeaking of dynamic efficiency, the self-replicating patterns abound in plant-life. Tachibana detected this phenomenon in ferns. Her research revealed that “ferns first appeared in the fossil record 360 million years ago. Ferns differ from seed plants in their mode of reproduction—lacking flowers and seeds. Like all other vascular plants, they have a life cycle referred to as alternation of generations, characterized by alternating diploid sporophytic and haploid gametophytic phases.”
In her paintings, drawings, and prints, Tachibana distills these processes down to “imaginary shapes” manifested in her own vernacular with the simplicity and purity of the circle. In the intaglio for the Print Club of Cleveland, fern-gm-1, the self-similar fractal patterns increase and decrease, morphing from miniscule circular voids to commanding dark spheres, as opacity confronts transparency with nuanced tonal variations. Leaf-forms are elusive, graced with delicate pendants. The organism appears to grow and, at the same time, regenerate, ethereal and ominous. Rooted in science, transformed by visual poetry, Tachibana creates an image of “subtle and profound beauty.”
Seiko Tachibana’s work is exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of several major museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum, Museum Meermanno-Wetreenianum, Den Haag, The Netherlands, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the Portland Art Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award.
By Darlene G. Michitsch
fern-gm-1, 2020. The Print Club of Cleveland, Publication Print No. 100 for 2022. Etching, aquatint, and spit bite on Rives BFK paper; Image 8 x 14 in.; Sheet 20 x 25 in.