Description
Tanzaku is a landscape that attempts to connect my diluted Japanese esthetic with my upbringing in Nebraska. Being a sansei, a 3rd generation Japanese American, my contact with the culture was remote living my first 10 years in Omaha. Once when I was visiting my father’s father in Seattle, he had a mid-summer evening party at his home. Guests brought elegant bento boxes with exquisite food. I managed to cobble together a lumpy potato salad surrounded by deviled eggs. Guests were invited to write poems on delicate slips of paper in sumi and hang them on bamboo branches. Grandpa urged me to participate. I reluctantly wrote, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, I wish I were elsewhere, So do you.” Later I learned that these slips of paper are called Tanzaku.
In my satin tapestry, the tanzaku become cotton rags tied to a barbwire fence, visible enough to warn livestock and humans in the expanse of flat prairie. Like the ritual tanzaku, they are my wishes to break free and ride the wind.
