Hitoko Okada
August 26 - September 26, 2026
Reception: Friday, September 11 from 6-8pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 401 Richmond St West, Suite 108, Toronto
A cosmology is the story a culture tells about how the world came to be, how its parts hold together, and where a single life sits inside it. It accounts for origins and endings, for what is sacred and what is asked of us. In this exhibition, Hitoko Okada crafts a material cosmology. Working as a Nikkei artist with Japanese folk-heritage textiles and the plant knowledge carried alongside them, Okada treats indigo, hemp, washi and gold not as inert materials but as ancestors with memory, moving through colonial rupture, industrial extraction and ecological collapse toward something still forming.
Two installations set that story in motion: Hive hangs as a screen of washi paper stiffened with konnyaku root starch and gilded in traditional gold leaf, its panels hand-cut into honeycomb lace. Washi and konnyaku once clothed working people in Japan, and here the material holds the weight of the labour, much of it gendered and racialized, that still runs through the global fashion supply chain. Against those inherited structures Okada imagines a way out, a milky way of possibilities held together like a hive.
Genesis lays a raft of recovered ocean plastic across the floor. Raku-fired ceramic pods, glazed to an oil-slick sheen or dyed with indigo and fermented persimmon, germinate among nurdles, the pre-production pellets that are the origin form of nearly all plastic and now one of the ocean’s largest pollutants. The pods are imagined seeds of indigo, hemp and cotton. Oil appears not as waste but as an ancient ancestor, unearthed and returned as a mononoke, a dark presence remaking bodies, waters and whole ecosystems.
What binds the two works is transformation, and in particular the idea that an ending and a beginning can be the same event. Okada draws on Heather Davis’s Plastic Matter to think of plastic as a strange kind of offspring and of oil as time folded back on itself, the deep past surfacing into the deep future. Behind it sits the forced opening of Japan in the 1850s and the industrial remaking that followed, which pushed aside centuries of dye and plant knowledge. A seed, as Okada puts it, is a site of birth and death at once. That is what the title asks us to hold: that a world can be ending and beginning in the same materials, and that craft, with its long patience and inherited knowledge, is one way of attending to the passage between.
Hitoko Okada is a queer, Nikkei interdisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. Their artistic practice has evolved over years across fashion, theatre, installation and curatorial projects, as ongoing research in Japanese folk-heritage textile crafts. Okada has furthered their research through several artist residencies including Haystack Mountain School of Craft, in USA; Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto, Japan; and Banff Centre for the Arts, in Alberta. Okada’s projects have been presented throughout Southern Ontario including Cambridge Arts Galleries, Art Gallery of Burlington, Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, The Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, and recently, with Theatre Replacement in Vancouver. They have received multiple grants, and awards including Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Hamilton City Enrichment Fund and Arts Award. Okada has recently returned to school to complete an MFA at Emily Carr University in Vancouver.
hitoko.ca
Banner image: Hitoko Okada, "Setsubun: sacred offerings to the divine divide" installation at Cambridge Art Galleries, Queen's Square, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.
