Hiroko Takeda: here is a coast; here is a harbor

Alison Bradley Projects is pleased to present here is a coast; here is a harbor, the gallery's first exhibition with Japanese-born, New York–based artist Hiroko Takeda (b.1966). Bringing together works spanning different periods of her career, the exhibition traces Takeda's sustained interrogation of weaving as a medium of abstraction, material experimentation, and poetic expression. Drawing upon Japanese craft traditions, twentieth-century modernism, and industrial textile design, Takeda creates compositions in which structural precision and material unpredictability coexist. Through an unconventional vocabulary of natural and synthetic fibers, found materials, and interrupted woven structures, her work considers how personal memory, historical narratives, and the physical world might be registered through thread.

The exhibition takes its title from the first line in Elizabeth Bishop's 1952 poem Arrival at Santos, whose attentive observations, understated humor, and movement between external landscapes and internal perceptions resonate with Takeda's sensibility. Like Bishop's poetry, Takeda's compositions offer a subjective mapping of the world, in which the incidental and the familiar become sites of sustained inquiry.

There is a productive contradiction at the heart of Takeda's practice: an exacting knowledge of textile construction permits an almost willful disregard for its conventions. Her early engagement with mingei, the Japanese folk craft movement, established an appreciation for the inherent properties of materials and the aesthetic possibilities of utilitarian objects. Subsequent experience at Kawashima in Tokyo, the Royal College of Art in London, and the studio of textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen introduced her to the systematic processes of industrial weaving. Yet in her independent practice, Takeda frequently unsettles the very structures she has mastered. Transparent monofilament warps support irregular accumulations of natural fibers, while weft threads double back, terminate abruptly, or extend beyond the woven surface. The resulting compositions retain the underlying logic of the grid while resisting its demands for repetition and symmetry.

In Matsushima Triptych (2026), this tension assumes a distinctly painterly character. Inspired by the writings of seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō and conceived in response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the work comprises three translucent panels interrupted by passages of black fiber. The discontinuous wefts evoke the gestural marks of ink painting, their varying densities suggesting an atmospheric landscape that appears alternately to emerge and recede. A different relationship between historical source and material form is evident in Nigh You Cliff (Correspondence) (2019), which takes as its point of departure an 1862 letter written aboard a whaling ship. Here, an open, translucent weave gives way to a dense accumulation of scarlet threads cascading toward the floor, its ambiguous imagery suggesting both the romance and violence of maritime passage.

Elsewhere, Takeda's engagement with the everyday becomes more explicit. In Quotidien (Bustelo) (2026), strips of discarded coffee packaging are incorporated into the weave, their flashes of yellow interrupting the surrounding fibers. The work recalls the Japanese traditions of boro and sakiori, in which worn textiles are patched or repurposed, while reconsidering the relationship between consumption, utility, and aesthetic value. In Dig II (2025), woven sisal is submerged in water, allowing the fiber to contract and distort as it dries. Such interventions complicate distinctions between intention and accident, suggesting a reciprocal relationship between artist and material.

Returning to Bishop's poetic sensibility, Takeda's weavings propose a form of cartography that is neither fixed nor exhaustive. Like the coast and harbor in Bishop's poem, the world offers itself through fragments of observation, its contours continually altered by perception and experience. In Takeda's hands, weaving becomes a means not of faithfully reproducing these landscapes, but of tracing the uncertain territory between what is seen, remembered, and imagined.

The exhibition is accompanied by an original essay by renowned craft historian, curator, and writer Glenn Adamson.