Biography

Marine One (b. 1997, Tokyo) is a visual artist who works in a range of media, including installation, painting, sculpture, video and textiles.



Capturing an audience through playful unease is pivotal to my practice. Sewing together stuffed limbs, bulging eyes, and common foodstuffs skewed for viewing pleasure, I orchestrate unnerving scenes to pull wandering eyes into a strange awakening.

Toxic masculinity and the objectification of women are shared societal illnesses amongst both Japanese and Western cultures. Having traversed both worlds, I am fascinated with the gendered stereotypes that are ingrained so deeply in many of us. I have felt and seen how these ideas creep their way into the human psyche like carbon monoxide. For many of us, it’s easier to leave the poison  unaddressed.

To explore and challenge this, I stage my installations to provoke the viewer into waking from their personal versions of this ‘sleep’, no matter how cognisant they feel they already are. A deliberate uncanniness is fabricated through juxtapositions of the unfamiliar-familiar with images mined from accessible online image banks or my own family archives. This stitched tension is decisively non-violent: soft, welcoming fabrics are chosen for the tactile sense of the image, elevating its two or three dimensional stand-in.

Whether it is a towering macho-man-head-torso in a business suit or strange, fluffy humanoid creatures adorned with pinned bows to be held in the hand, my conceptions are immersive invitations to an eerie party that delivers a lingering presence in the brain: feminine, masculine, both, neither - actively dwelling long after their first touch. This charged interplay between my work and the viewer is what captivates me to keep making, as I continue to wake.