Yuko Ishii

"I approach both my life and my art committed to the mystical belief that I am entering a totally different dimension of reality, and I expand my intuition to understand the hidden meanings of being and of life." "

Yuko Ishii's home in the mountains provides her with much inspiration for her photography and mixed media artwork. Her largest body of artwork documents the diversity of expressions of birds in nature to capture the beauty and sensibility she encounters in her everyday life. She enjoys communing with birds in an effort to understand their habits and habitat to support bird conservation.

Ishii creates digital photographs, which she manipulates on the computer. She then prints the images with archival pigment inks on printmaking paper. She highlights each print with colored pencils to give her work a more painterly quality. Each print is affixed onto a deep wood panel. Lastly, she coats each print on panel with wax to give the image a translucent quality.

She is a self-taught artist from Japan who moved to Washington state in 2001.

Collections
Corporate collection, Welmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Des Moines, IA, 2010
University collection, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, WA, 2009
Corporate collection, Farm Bureau Financial Services, West Des Moines, IA, 2009
University collection, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, 2008
Awards
San Francisco Fine Art Fair, Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA , 2011
photo l.a. XX, the 20th International Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, CA , 2011
On the Cutting Edge West Coast Artists Using Collage & Assemblage Juried Exhibition, Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay, OR, 2009 - 2010
Across the Divide: Contemporary Art from the Scablands and Beyond Juried Exhibition, CoCA, Seattle's Center on Contemporary Ar, Seattle, WA, 2009
Juried Exhibition "Sculptural Books: Memory and Desire", The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ, 2010