Title: Serpentine Serenity
Artist: June Sekiguchi
Year: 2020
Medium: Vinyl
Dimension: 8’5” x 9’1”(wall A), 8’ x 7’10” (wall B)
Description of artwork
Inside SEA’s Sensory Room you will find a thoughtfully made, soothing space designed for neurodivergent travelers and those seeking a calm environment. Tacoma-based artist June Sekiguchi presents a unique design for the space with Serpentine Serenity. An immersive experience implying movement, the free-flowing water patterns in shades of blue offer a calming focus for the viewer. In the low-light atmosphere of the Sensory Room, Serpentine Serenity lulls in its viewers and invites closer inspection. For Sekiguchi, water is both an essential sustenance and a purifier of the soul. This sense of clarity and peace, paired with a form borrowing from both plants and animals, turns this piece into living guardians of the space.
More information about the Sensory room at SEA: Sensory Room | Port of Seattle (portseattle.org)
About the artist
June Sekiguchi was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas. At 16 she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and experienced for the first time the vastness of the ocean. In 1983 she graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Studio Art. She now lives in Tacoma, WA where she makes sculptures and immersive, large-scale installations that are pattern-based, modular and site responsive. She processes, deconstructs, and re-structures forms, focusing on metaphorical interpretations of the source material.
Sekiguchi is an arts activist and advocate involved in social justice issues, cultural exchange, mental health, and elder communities. Her work has been exhibited regionally including the Bellevue Arts Museum Biennial Exhibition for wood, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Sculpture Northwest in Bellingham, Edmonds Community College, Gallery One in Ellensburg, and Vashon Cultural Arts gallery and internationally in Sweden, Morocco and Laos.
“I address cultural identity, cross cultural exchange, and personal narratives through the interplay of surface pattern and structural form. On a deeper level, I metaphorically seek meaning in patterns of humanity, and more intimately, personal patterns of habit. My work is a way of processing significant personal rites of passage and concerns about the world around me.”- June Sekiguchi
