Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall

Overview

Tokujin Yoshioka is a designer who puts striking curves into the fabric of everyday furniture, boxes or even shop displays. His vision of design rests on making a strong emotional connection, and a lot of industrial-size glass. He also does art, having made temples of glass or shimmering ice-like slabs which seem to ripple even as they are, in reality, completely still. An upcoming exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is bringing his work to Sydney, collecting his work here for the first time, under the title Waterfall.

As well as the eponymous, rippling Waterfall the show promises to introduce Sydney to the variety of Yoshioka's career. Thousands upon thousands of drinking straws are already in Paddington, the hallmark of room-filling sculpture Tornado, a life-size confection which wraps the viewer in a rickety cloud of stalky plastic. Geometry, smooth forms and a lightness all combine in his work, whether making a life-size, functional paper chair which molds to your shape (but only the once), or papering a wall with suede flowers for a Campers shop in London. This is Yoshioka's first foray to Australian shores, but odds-on you'll soon be hankering after a return engagement.