Down the rabbit hole, into a world of pure imagination
Discovering the beautiful botanically-inspired art of Haruka Misawa
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Come with me on a journey down the rabbit hole. Our voyage begins in my living room, on the sofa, phone in hand. (Yes, this is a digital adventure, but no less invigorating for it.)
I open my Substack app and attempt to catch up on unread posts. I currently subscribe to 32 Substack publications. I love them all, and don’t feel compelled to ditch a single one, but let’s face it, 32 is too many. I simply don’t have time to read every single post.
But I try. And so it was that I found myself on Substack’s weekly Shoutout Thread, in which the platform invites people to shine a light on their favourite newsletters. I started scrolling through the comments, partly out of a desire to discover some hidden gems, and partly, if I’m honest, to see whether anyone had recommended The Earthworm.
Reader, there were 1,300 comments, many of which offered recommendations for multiple publications. And this is where I have a problem. I’m what I believe is termed a “Completer-Finisher”. Once I have begun a task – be that weeding the borders, reorganising the contents of a cupboard, or writing a post on this here newsletter – I will not stop until the job is done. I do not dip in and out. I do not dabble. My approach is that of every Mastermind host ever: “I’ve started so I’ll finish.”
Needless to say, I skim-read each of those 1,300 comments. There were, among them, a couple of shoutouts for The Earthworm, for which I am grateful. But also a number of other publications that caught my eye, including The Floral Dispatch, the latest Substack from Bangalore-based writer and poet Rohini Kejriwal.
In Rohini’s own words, The Floral Dispatch is “a monthly newsletter on flowers, words and creativity”, and is a thoughtfully curated mix of poetry, pictures and botanical miscellany. It’s well worth checking out, if you haven’t come across it already. It was on the latest post that I came across the next stop on my magical mystery hyperlink tour: Artistic Moods, a blog about all things arty from Dutch ceramicist Sandra Apperloo.
And from here, it is only a short hop to our final destination: the work of the hitherto unbeknownst to me Japanese artist Haruka Misawa. Through her eponymous design institute, Misawa takes an experimental and often quite playful approach, twisting and turning, distorting and dissecting her subjects in order to highlight some previously unseeable aspect of their characters.
From architectural fishbowls to unusual taxidermy, the majority of Misawa’s projects in recent years have centred around some aspect or other of the natural world. But it’s her botanically-inspired work which I instantly fell in love with.
In Tuesday’s rundown of my favourite daffodils (for paid subscribers only – do consider upgrading to see the full list), I made reference to the central petals of Narcissus ‘Pyjama Party’ as being reminiscent of a coloured pencil shaving. Well, in Misawa’s Paper Flower collection, which I discovered a couple of days after publishing that post, we can see this reminiscence in reverse.
The colours, forms and textures are so beautifully evocative of what one can find out in nature, and so (seemingly!) simply and elegantly achieved. So much modern art gets snootily dismissed as looking like it was done by a four-year-old. But I think here it’s that apparent attainability that I love so much about it – Misawa was just the one clever and creative enough to look at a pile of pencil shavings and see not rubbish, but flowers.
Perhaps simpler still, and yet no less lovely, is her leaf-centric collection. Perfect circles are sliced out of leaves, then either turned through 90 degrees and reinserted, or in other cases slotted into different leaves entirely. From a technical standpoint, it couldn’t be much more straightforward, but it encourages you to look upon these leaves in a whole new light, seeing not just each leaf’s basic shape, but all of its colour-tones and intricate veins and papery translucence.
All I can say is, thank goodness for Haruka Misawa – and all of the content creators that led me to her work – for miraculously transforming a half hour of couchbound procrastination into a period of gloriously fruitful research. If only all rabbit holes were that productive.
What do you think of Misawa’s work? Has it inspired you to gather some leaves and/or pencil shavings for some creative projects of your own? If you do end up crafting some Misawa-inspired art, please do send it my way, and I’ll share it with the wider Earthworm community.
Love the connections
Thanks for sharing!