Miya Ando

Miya Ando’s sculptures, drawings, and paintings are visual contemplations of emotion and season, pulling from an understanding of nature’s transience and the impermanence of life, while creating a vocabulary for the sublime and ephemeral. Ando’s work is informed by her life experience growing up in Japan and the Santa Cruz Mountains. Currently residing in New York City, she spends much of her time in Bolinas with family, where she finds the beauty that surrounds her mesmerizing.

On March 17, 2020, life as we knew it was inexplicably changed by a nationwide lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. To calm her fears, Ando sought solace in the sky, and to the constant yet ever-changing moon. Looking each night at the sky, reassurance came through phases of the moon. Ando recorded what she saw each night, painting with indigo on handmade Japanese paper. Indigo has been used for over 6,000 years, globally and for hundreds of years in Japan and it is natural compound that produces a deep, dark blue. In Ando’s hands, indigo’s dilution and concentration and the addition of micronized silver create the varying illuminations of the moon, stars, and galaxies.