Let's go together.

This art panel is the work of Yoko Kamitani, a Japanese artist specialising in indigo dyeing and shibori — the ancient Japanese art of shaping and binding cloth before dyeing. On a wooden board, she has affixed a piece of linen dyed in indigo against a white-painted ground, creating a work that is at once intimate and luminous.

Allons-y ensemble — Let's go together. This is the message Kamitani chose to breathe into this piece. In her own words: look around you, invite someone who doesn't quite know where they want to go, and set off together. Perhaps you will find something. A gentle invitation, with no fixed destination — addressed to whoever looks at this work on their wall.

The indigo Kamitani uses is not simply a colour. It is a living material. Made by extracting lye from wood ash and using it to ferment sukumo — the raw material of Japanese indigo — it behaves like a living thing whose condition must be read each time anew. Every time I dye something, I ask the indigo to make a beautiful colour for me, she says. The number of dye baths determines the depth of the blue: each piece carries within it the memory of this patient dialogue between the artist and the material.

Yoko Kamitani has a particular bond with France. In 2008, she presented an installation in Lyon entitled Out of the Blue — a two-layer indigo-dyed linen work suspended between two rooms, shifting and changing expression with the flow of air through the gallery. The exhibition was met with great enthusiasm. This panel — modest in scale, boundless in depth — is an invitation to bring something of that same sensibility into your own home.

To be hung alone on a white wall, or offered as a silent message.

Dimensions: W 14 cm × D 2 cm × H 18 cm
Materials: Wooden board, linen, indigo dye, white paint
Artist: Yoko Kamitani
Shipped from Kyoto, Japan