Thanks to a scholarship, Ōki Izumi assisted the sculpture master at the Accademia di Brera. She tested herself with all traditional materials, from marble to bronze, but as soon as she received her diploma she went back to the only one she feels really hers, glass.

The glass she uses is not the precious and clear crystal, but the industrial one, blue-green coloured, recalling the natural elements of water and air, very special to Japanese culture. Material hard to domesticate, fragile but impenetrable, glass imposes its conditions on its manufacturing process: in order to be made by hand, cuts can be only straight, so angles only squared, shapes only regular polygons. In these firm play rules, Ōki Izumi’s ability – equipped with calculator and graph paper – is that of carving some space out for her creativity, trying to bend the linear geometry of plates towards soft and sinuous effects. Stratifying plate over plate, or sometimes lifting pieces up in verticality, she shapes abstract synthesis, vases, mysterious architectures in which you can look into and through.

The artist’s research – strongly influenced by her Japanese essence – points towards the synthetic creation of simple units, even when it starts from the chaos in a multitude of elements. However, it is not a merely formal research: Izumi is interested, instead, in the emotional aspect by inciting astonishment, offering to public an opportunity to reflect, or by suggesting through shapes the imaginative possibilities already latent in people’s mind.