Bio

Yukimi Akiba lives in Japan, working with mixed media and embroidery as her main medium. She created a series of Polaroid self-portraits, “Creative ‘Self’ Destruction” in 2019-2021, isolating herself from the world. The process played an important role as a therapy for illness, as a way of not physically harming herself or others, and as a way of rebuilding what she had lost in her life due to trauma. The “Timeless Knots” project, which she began in 2021 using found vintage photographs, is her attempt to reconstruct a new relationship with others and the world, and the experiment in empathy and visualization that emerges from it. The timeless dialogue between the sitter, the photographer, all the creatures in the image, and herself is carefully and emotionally stitched, stitch by stitch, with respect, and transformed into contemporary art form. Her poetic manner with thread brings new narratives and interpretations to forgotten objects, and her original works are held in private collections worldwide.