Japanese artist Fumi Imamura returns to Lyndsey Ingram with The Garden of Musubi—a second solo exhibition curated by Julia Tarasyuk. Rich with symbolism and spiritual resonance, the exhibition explores musubu—to tie, bind, connect—as a living principle of transformation through the medium of collage and watercolour works on paper.
Rooted in Shinto cosmology musubi is the divine energy of creation and transformation. Imamura draws particular inspiration from Kamimusubi, one of the three primordial deities, often regarded as a mother goddess in the genealogy of a matriarchal society. The name itself binds two powerful ideas: kami (god or paper) and musubi (to tie). Imamura reflects on this connection deeply beyond materials and process. While creating this exhibition, she was caring for her newborn child. The revelations of early motherhood profoundly shaped her practice, shifting her relationship to time, attention and embodiment.
“My flowers are born from paper (kami),” she writes. “Tying (musubu) paper (kami ) flowers feels very sacred.” Her delicate collages reflect the cyclical nature of life and creation: “Flowers fall and bear fruit. The fruit falls and flowers bloom again.” Repetition, fragmentation, and renewal are echoed across each piece in gestures of quiet persistence and poetic resilience.
The exhibition moves between bold and quiet energies: vivid hues of red, yellow, and purple, intertwined with pale tones of blue and green. Together, these bodies of work echo the rhythm of breathing, the active and passive phases of inhale and exhale, fullness and release. Imamura describes this as a metaphor not only for life itself, but for the creative process: “Breathing out, so I can breathe in.”
The Garden of Musubi invites viewers into a world of interconnection between body and spirit, breath and silence, vivid and pale, fullness and lack. It is a space where cycles unfold and resolve, where the sacred is not distant but present in the smallest acts of attention. Imamura's paper gardens do not merely represent nature they embody it, its repetitions, its fragility, and its resilience.
