Mika Obayashi

MFA Fibers and Material Studies, 2025

With the severity of the environmental crisis looming, my work confronts the supposedly fixed systems we occupy with levity and infinite possibility. Working between fiber techniques and sculpture, I upend the assumptions of our physical world by guiding that which is ordinary into the realms of the poetic and absurd. This disruption to the standard systems of value is traced through unassuming materials and objects that have presumably reached the end of their life such as cut-offs and post-consumer waste.

By reaching into what feels to be a spiritual realm of material that calls attention to its agency and history, I humble the human subject by positioning them between the cosmic and intimate scales simultaneously. In stacking, balancing, placing, hanging, threading, suspending, folding, and combining, I strive to form new arrangements that are universes unto themselves. These sculptures are knowable in their materiality, but somehow (in their proximity, configuration, context) reveal the infinite potential of things, gesturing forward and backward in time but with a singular now function.