STUDIO BYCOLOR｜katadori

STORY

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  This is a project created by combining the talent and perspective of Kaori Akiyama of STUDIO BYCOLOR and a young Japanese traditional Ise-katagami paper craft artisan Keiko Nasu.
  Katadori means to make shape. The word "dori" means bird in Japanese.
  
  STUDIO BYCOLOR is dedicated to find meanings and effects that colors have on people.
  This firm is known to employ wide range of colors and material in product design, space design as well as branding. The driving force is curiosity and inquiring mind because of seeking comfort in product design.　She is inspired and interested with the natural patterns of plants, animals, cracks and undulating bubbles.
  
  Keiko left the printing company when she was 27 years old, She learned about Ise katagami in search of her life-long dream of making handicrafts. She moved to Mie prefecture for training.
  She mastered the traditional way of making Ise katagami paper artworks which was developed thousands of years ago. and works passionately to pass it on to the next generation.
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  Have you ever heard of Ise katagami? It is a beautiful and artistic traditional Japanese art, closely related to stencil cutting. It has been used as an elegant way to decorate patterns on kimono and clothes, and is now mostly used for design and delicate works of art.
  
  For many, Ise katagami is an incredible work of art. It consists of sheets of minogami, traditional Japanese paper, made waterproof with kakishibu, which is persimmon juice, and cut into stencil patterns with four main techniques.
  
  The techniques include dôgubori (where various-shaped tools are used), shimabori (parallel lines, cut one next to the other), tsukibori (delicate patterns, such as floral decorations) and kiribori (quantity of small dots form the ornamentation). Shimabori and kiribori are especially incredible, with an unimaginable degree of precision in the first technique, as each parallel line must have exactly the same length and width as the previous one, and an intricate form of pointillism for the second, where more than a hundred of dots can be made on 3cm of paper.
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  Nasu's technique consists of deep concentration, power of fingertips and thoughts of making each carved pattern important.
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  For this collaboration project, the patterned katagami papers themselves are used to create beautiful light fixtures called “kata-dori”. The pattern comes from birds that live in the Ise Grand Shrine called Blue-and-White flycatchers. I simply expressed the pattern of bird's feathers.
  
  We made a lamp patterned with bird's feather and carved beautifully by Ms Nasu. The lamp's carving expresses the beauty of light and shadow. The lovely design was made into reality by our dedication and passion.
  
  These blue and white handkerchiefs were dyed according to the blue-and-white flycatchers' feathers. When the handkerchief is exposed to light, a bird's feathers appear in the shadows and stand outh due to its wonderful carving.
  Let's learn from the past and maximize the natural materials that we can get from nature. We should not confine ourselves into the boundaries of modernization and existing fad. I personally think that the era we are in now, gives more value to design than before.