Just a few months after graduating, Yuko Michishita is hard at it. She is already working on a commission for Liberty, as well as on personal projects and trying to make fabrics using her illustrations. But then, it’s hardly surprising that her precocious talent has been snapped up by the Regent Street leviathan and champion of artistic talent; after all, her work is intricate, meticulous, quirky and mesmerizing - even, as she puts it, ‘unnerving on a certain level.’ In spite of this, Michishita, who has loved drawing since she was tiny, never considered her talent to be anything serious – that was, until she moved to England to try her hand at studying art, all of which culminated last year in a captivating degree show which explored female roles in Japan, the Andes and the Hmong tribe. ‘I created a trilogy of tapestry-like illustration. I left the women's faces blank in order to show that the female of the society working together as one in unison... in a way it's a lack of identity but that's how female is considered in some societies in history I believe.’ Her work is inspired principally by photographs – anything from published work to snaps taken by backpackers on holiday, while her great driving force is, quite simply, ‘to see something I had in my mind re-appear on a piece of paper.’
Most influenced by:
Bosch, Aubrey Bearsley, Ernst Heackel
INFORMATION
ILLUSTRATION
School
University of Brighton, UK
Graduated
2009
