Sayuri Ichida: Playing the Piano Upstairs

Through luminous handcrafted prints, Sayuri Ichida explores memory, grief and sisterhood against the snow-covered landscapes of rural Japan. Sayuri Ichida (b. 1985, Japan) is a UK-based photographer who focuses on themes of self-identity, reflecting on her own memories and life experiences. Her latest series, Playing the Piano Upstairs, centres on Ichida's relationship with her sister, which she describes as distant when they were young. After losing their mother in their late teens, the sisters slowly built a fragile but enduring closeness. Photographing her sister became a way for Ichida to trace the emotional transformation of their bond. Ichida creates quiet, atmospheric images in which the figure of her sister appears alongside natural and sculptural forms. Set against the landscape of their hometown of Niigata, Japan, this work draws on the region's long winters of heavy snowfall. Ichida describes these snowscapes as, "visual metaphors for memory itself; mutable, obscured, yet softly glowing just below the surface." The prints do seem to glow; Ichida creates each by hand using a mix of archival pigment and photopolymer photogravure printing on Japanese washi papers. The slow, highly skilled photogravure process mirrors the reflective, archival nature of memory, while the vivid pigments prints inject unexpected moments of colour and cinematic abstraction. Together, these contrasting methods encapsulate the complex emotional landscape of the sisters' shared history.