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Curator’s Note
by Claire Shea
In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in Japan, a printmaking style known as ukiyo-e (浮世絵) or "pictures of the floating world" flourished. The legend of a catfish who thrashed about and caused earthquakes had been mythologised since the 16th century, but in the period immediately following the 1855 Edo (now Tokyo) earthquake, alongside the rise of ukiyo-e, these images of Namazu-e or ‘catfish prints’ began to circulate profusely as this “earthquake fish” was considered responsible for initiating the great disaster. But this legend was not purely fabricated. It emerged shortly after the earthquake that an eel fisherman had seen an unusually active catfish in a river preceding the event, and in the 1930s, seismologists confirmed that catfish demonstrated increased agitation several hours before an earthquake occurred, enabling them to predict these events with a remarkably high accuracy.
For Hatanaka, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were fishermen, this collective myth is entangled with personal histories. Using natural dyes and washi (Japanese paper), Hatanaka has developed a contemporary approach to printmaking that often serves as a documentation of the environment, while also highlighting its entanglement with our physical and emotional worlds. In addition to linocut prints, a common technique found in her practice is gyotaku—a traditional Japanese method used by fishermen to record their catches before the invention of photography. Hatanaka creates contemporary gyotaku prints during her travels and residencies, maintaining this symbolic and material connection to the marine world through her work. These prints are then often integrated into larger works that stitch together images produced by Hatanaka across geographies and time, for example, in her own Namazu (2023). When sewn together into larger compositions, her prints are evocative of the patchworked patterns found in boro textiles, associated with peasant farmers in 17th to 19th-century Japan and seemingly donned by several of the figures in the namazu-e image above. These garments were made from repurposed and re-woven fabrics, often dyed with indigo, and born out of necessity in times of material scarcity. In contemporary times, these textiles have gained new appreciation for their embodiment of the wabi-sabi aesthetic, which values imperfection, simplicity, and modesty – aspects that can also be found in Hatanaka’s practice.
Although the imagery in many of Hatanaka’s linocut prints appears to portray a floating world, they are instead the snowdrifts found across the Arctic. In 2014, Hatanaka began working in Kinngait, where washi was introduced in the 1950s and has been used for printmaking since. Here, she began documenting the frozen formations that the Inuit have used for centuries as natural forms of navigation. During this time, she also met Ashoona Ashoona, and in 2021, they began to collaborate on a project to trace a loose "map/nunangua" of the Arctic region, beginning with Tujjaat Island, where Ashoona's grandmother, artist Pitseolak Ashoona, was born. The map moves through time and geographies, passing Netsilik Lake to recollect Ashoona's namesake's travels around the region, and spans through the Northwest Passage to Yokohama, Japan, the birthplace of Hatanaka's grandmother. Uummatima tillirninga, I can feel my heart beat (2021), is a work that visually cites ancient Japanese maps, which were intended to be read north to south, and which incorporated illustrations, like notable figures and well-known sites. In this case, the artists' hands and portraits of their respective grandmothers, in combination with prints of the snowdrifts, are featured.
These snowdrift prints resurface in many of Hatanaka’s works, serving as a documentation of this fragile environment, which is under threat today from rising temperatures. Similarly, her gyotaku prints also act as a form of record-keeping. In fact, today, historical gyotaku prints are now used by scientists to assess the biodiversity of the sea from centuries past. In this way, Hatanaka’s practice is not only about bearing witness, but she also asks us to consider how, like the catfish, we might have this bioattunement to our environment and a capacity to sense its changes on a cellular level.
More recently, Hatanaka’s work has turned toward exploring how climate change may also be shaping our ‘inner landscapes.’ Living with bipolar disorder, she is particularly interested in how such conditions may have evolved and why they persist. In recent years, research into the evolutionary origin of this condition suggests that it may have developed during the last Ice Age as an adaptive response to extreme climate variability, allowing for periods of shutdown or hibernation to conserve energy. She is constantly questioning what insights this condition might offer as we navigate the increasing fluctuations of today’s world.
In parallel, Hatanaka has begun to explore the changing language of emotion and pathology as a way of mapping collective psychological shifts. In Faultlines and Loneliness (2024), she charts the steep rise in the usage of the word ‘loneliness’ over time, embedding this word usage graph into a series of prints of the landscape, thus drawing a connection between inner and outer forms of instability.
Hatanaka’s work acknowledges that as industrialization accelerates, we become increasingly distanced from our bodies’ knowledge of natural materials and the land. In response, her practice offers a way to uphold traditions that honor our deep, human relationships with the earth. In the face of growing concerns for the future, Hatanaka also approaches her work as an act of stewardship. Her dedication to papermaking continues a tradition practiced in East and Southeast Asia for over 1000 years, alongside the use of natural dyes cultivated across centuries and geographies. By embracing these traditional materials and methods, Hatanaka affirms that sustaining such practices is an act of resistance.