Craft Club presents Nína Harra and Masaki Komoto

17.01.2020

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The thread forms a path, the footprints echo below the surface, extending like roots. I transpose the callouses and blisters of my fingers to my feet and imagine that I’ve been walking for days. Hello————hello grandma I never even dreamed a phonecall could reach such deep mountain from the other side of the world. Craft Club isn’t really a club of organised activity, a group of weekly meetings or a collective engaged in shared artistic endeavours. The emblem of a ball of yarn with its tongue out symbolises a unity between two solitary practices. Disorganised activity of different methods and mediums resulting in a similar conclusions: The articulation of meaning and experience through labor. The artists both approach and inhabit their work on different scales. Nína stands before an expansive grey surface that covers her horizon and peripheral vision, licking her index finger like an explorer in search of a tailwind before setting off on an unexplored path. Nína is a hiker. She’s covering and mapping out the surface and area, getting the lay of the land. Her works are like explored fragments of a map in a video game, uncovered places surrounded by pixelated mist, another pixel revealed with each step. Uniform blocks of material representing clouds, mountains, glaciers and lakes. Solid general typological things, which if prodded reveal an unstable materiality. Masaki is a healer. He approaches the surface like a body. A tactile and kinaesthetic surface with its own nerve-endings that feel and are felt. Masaki sits with his work, intimately holding, pulling and folding it between his hands like a masseuse. He pierces and pulls it, squeezes and massages it. It’s acupuncture, resolving the tension inside by piercing the surface. The knots underneath the skin are the result of stress, both physical and emotional strain materialised beneath the surface. A tangled mess of synapses, knots and swelling, appearing on the surface as an ache. A simple sentence, a sentiment of longing.