Grandfather from Sapporo 1906

Silk - a treasured material from Japan in the early 1900's - used in combination with cyanotype which inherintly has a quality of surprise, process, revelation and is also historical. Some pieces get layered, images overlap, red stitching hold the story together. Like Akai Ito - the legend of the "red thread" - the belief that there is an invisible red thread linking people together that has no bounds of time or distance. As I construct the image, I am imagining what theri lives were like, what it felt like to come to a foreign land on a ship as a teenager, leaving behind a family that had lost two members in the Russo Japanese war, now the third son disappearing to a far away land. I find out later that my grandfather in the images was a silk trader and my great grandfather was developing silk sericulture in the formative years of Sapporro. I share their DNA and this seems meaningful.