Akiko Diegel

Love Generation

Location: Gate F, Level 4

Background: 100% NZ wool blanket hand embroidered “shoelace holes”.

Foreground: Upcycled NZ-made retro wool blanket, representing the flags of Rugby World Cup 2021 nations.

In the twenty-first century, outmoded hand skills, ironically, only remain in haute-couture high fashion. I am interested in this paradoxical state of the gradual disappearance of outmoded skills while they are, at the same time, prized by the most cutting-edge milieu. Also, traditional skills often contain repetitive elements. Repetition can be seen as the re-telling of an event in same words by a narrator or the use of the same discourse element to narrate different events. But the growth of the work, even from one line to a supposedly identical one, makes exact repetition impossible. Except in the context of progression, any repetition taking place in advancing time is not describable.

I am interested in the indescribable process of progression by repetitive activity that may emphasize the event of action and reinvent the importance of human facility.

Blankets serve not only as protection from our anxiety but are also sign of labour, through their painstaking production, and a physical embodiment of multiple lost histories, through the exchanges and uses they have been put through.

In buying blankets from opportunity shops, and transforming them into artwork, I am trying to emphasise the sometimes harsh reality of our rapidly changing world, filled with throw-away culture and disposable mass production, and everyday life.

Akiko Diegel was born in Japan and lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. She graduated with an MFA in 2008 from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Since 2007 Diegel has exhibited in a number of significant group and solo exhibitions throughout New Zealand and internationally. In 2011, Akiko Diegel was awarded the Paramount Award for her work Cure at the 20th Annual Wallace Art Awards. Further information at www.akikodiegel.com