Forest Spirit Memory II

Born in Akita Prefecture in 1994, Aoi Nagasawa currently resides there. She graduated in 2017 with a major in Arts & Roots from Akita University of Art. While living in Akita, she obtained a hunting license (Type 1 for rifle hunting and trapping) and engages with the hunting and Matagi culture of the Tohoku region. Through her paintings, she explores the "essence of life" and questions the relationship between "humans, living beings, and nature." Nagasawa graduated from Akita University of Arts in 2017 with a major in Arts & Roots. She has been mainly involved in the hunting and Matagi culture in the Tohoku region, which maintains a traditional hunting culture involving special customs and religious rituals. She has obtained a hunting license. She creates her paintings to record and express the relationship with multiple species through her own experiences and encounters with those other beings as a hunter. The driving force behind her creations is her contemplation over the relationship between people, other living beings, and nature, as well as understanding the boundaries between them by constantly shifting her macroscopic and microscopic perspectives. She makes her own painting materials from bears’ skin and stones and uses tree stumps as canvases. In this way, the mountains serve as both painting materials and motifs for her. Through fieldwork in the mountains, she seeks the roots of life and its many cycles.