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What Yuki Horiki claims is an absence of language (a knowledge of English) has become the force driving this artist to paint communiques from an inner world. Horiki's steady appearance in group shows over the last five years, most notably in No Piece of Cake (Cairns Regional Gallery, 1995) has been a progressive exposition of her painterly language. Now, the eloquence of formal Renaissance stillness is her strongest pictorial device, translating the humanistic affinities of her work into emblematic female forms.
Horiki's delicately rendered figures signify ideas and feelings. Some are clothed in theatrical dresses, enunciating gentle, archetypal gestures which seem to contain the serenity of very old traditions. The artist talks of Shinto beliefs as her spiritual heritage, one mediated by her move to north eastern Australia as an adult. Horiki's sympathy with the realm of human emotions and how these are affected by the natural world is the pervading quality of her recent exhibition, Life Vessel.
The largest painting entitled Her Table, reveals the internal dialogue conducted between our deliberate thoughts and involuntary feelings. The figures sitting across from one another at the incandescent yellow table, examine a mangrove seed, twigs, a piece of coral - banal enough items gathered from any beachcomber's stroll. But these ordinary things trigger subjective meanings and figures could be her, or you, or me musing over certain ideas and memories arising as we discard a thought, probe a feeling.
Other titles, Tidal Crossing, Fountain Tree, and Her as Nature suggest the co-mingling of human and ecological properties. The first contains two figures in transition between land and sea, set over the cycle of tides. Moon, boat