Teruko F. Nimura

University Place, WA

On view at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Tateuchi Pavilion

Teruko Nimura is a visual artist with a diverse multi-media practice that includes installation, sculpture, drawing, participatory performance, and public art. She is interested in themes of interconnectedness, collective memory and trauma, cultural, racial, and female representation, motherhood, and the climate crisis. Her varied explorations of mediums and modes are united by repetition as process, active viewership, an appreciation for the inherent language of materials, and the variations and flaws in handmade objects. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Teruko has exhibited in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. She was an Ox-Bow School of Art Fellow, an artist in the City of Austin’s LaunchPAD Program for emerging public artists, featured in 2017 TX Biennial, and one of five Austin artists invited to create work for New York City Highline’s traveling joint art initiative, New Monuments for New Cities. She recently moved from Austin to Tacoma, WA with her husband, two young children, and three cats to be closer to her sister and family.

Bloom

Bloom is a fantastical figure constructed entirely of strands of folded origami paper cranes. She is an assertion of Japanese American presence in a fractured American landscape. The tradition of folding origami cranes is a loving gesture of labor and endurance, full of hope. Like many children of immigrants, she is carrying the struggles and aspirations of past generations. Her blossom-colored robes are many things: an armored garment of protection, a declaration of identity, a celebration of culture, and a veil that can obscure.