a few years ago during a residency at a 300-year-old papermaker in Japan. “I was pounding mulberry, and I was like, I’m in heaven,” Arai says. The catharsis of pulverizing plants into fiber was enough to make her quit her job as a commercial photographer, which mostly involved working at a computer screen. “I needed to be working with my hands again,” she says. Since then, she has taken up fiber arts, making delicate patchwork collages out of hand-dyed and found antique fabrics. In Arai’s first solo show in New York, “Moments of Fulfillment,” she presents a series themed around the four seasons. It’s also the inaugural exhibition at Tiwa Select’s new gallery and events space at 181 Mott Street in Nolita.
The shoji-inspired textile screens and noren-like wall hangings in the show demonstrate Arai’s meticulous and obsessive attention to process. It begins with the dyes; she made her own from plants she’d foraged from Salmon Creek Farm, a commune turned artists’ retreat in Northern California. She harvested them at their peak in each season: cochineal and rhubarb in the spring, cosmos and goldenrod in the summer, chestnut and persimmon in the fall, and walnut and rosemary in the winter. She then collaged together the pieces of silk, linen, and cotton she had dyed into quiltlike compositions, adding in accents of bolder vintage textiles, including an orange-and-blue kimono fabric and a magenta floral pattern from Eastern Europe, which bring together her Japanese and Jewish ancestry. “It’s totally intuitive,” Arai says of how she assembled everything. “It’s like a feelings dance.”
