About

Everyday Fragments Becoming Presence
COLLECTIVE SELF — I Am Here, Now.

What shapes who we are?

My practice begins by gathering fragments scattered throughout everyday life—landscapes, memories, words, traces of time, and marks embedded in materials—and reconstructing them within new relationships.

I work with ordinary materials such as newspapers, printed paper, washi, photography, text, and drawing. Their colors, textures, layers, wear, and traces of peeling contain different experiences of time. For me, making art is also a process of bringing these different times together and allowing new relationships to emerge.

Abstraction is not a way of leaving reality behind. It is a way of looking again at the familiar world from another perspective. A subtle shift in viewpoint can reveal light and shadow, the physical presence of materials, layers of time, and relationships that had previously remained unnoticed.

My work does not seek to document the past or reproduce memory. Instead, I am interested in giving form to the moment when fragments enter into new relationships and another way of seeing—and another sense of time—begins to emerge.

COLLECTIVE SELF is not a fixed identity.

It is an ever-evolving presence, continuously formed through memories, experiences, relationships with others, and the countless events of everyday life.

My work attempts to give form to this ongoing process of becoming, while creating a space in which we can quietly reconsider the sense of being here, now.

I do not see the experience of art as ending with viewing an artwork. Through photography, text, exhibitions, workshops, and participatory practices, I am interested in creating situations in which viewers can connect the work with their own memories, perceptions, lived experiences, and ways of seeing. The changes that emerge between artwork, viewer, experience, and memory are also part of my practice.

Born in Chiba, Japan, and currently based in Hyogo. After graduating from Toyo Women's Junior College, Department of Euro-American Culture, Kodama worked for a trading company before independently studying design and developing a freelance career in web design, graphic design, illustration, and professional publishing.

She later studied painting at Musashino Art University, Department of Oil Painting, where she encountered abstract expression. Drawing on her background in composition, visual communication, and information design, her current practice explores fragments of everyday life and memory, time, traces, and ways of seeing.

Alongside two-dimensional works, her practice has expanded to photography, text, exhibitions, workshops, and participatory projects, creating situations in which new questions and discoveries can emerge between artwork and viewer.

• Grand Prize — 21st Century Art Borderless Exhibition, The National Art Center, Tokyo
• Fine Work Award — 1st All Japan Open Art Exhibition
• Holbein Award & Incentive Award — 95th Shunyo Exhibition, Kansai Shunyo Association
• Selected — International Biennial of Humour and Satire in Art, Bulgaria
• Selected — Shunyo Exhibition (94th, 95th, 96th, and 98th editions), among others

Before focusing on her art practice, Kodama worked extensively as a freelance designer across web design, graphic design, illustration, and visual communication. Her professional experience includes corporate projects for Toyota, Microsoft, NTT Group, Sumitomo Corporation, Taisho Pharmaceutical, SEGA, Kikkoman, and others. This background in composition, visual structure, and information design continues to inform her current artistic practice.

Kodama has authored more than ten professional books on Photoshop, Illustrator, web design, and visual communication. Her experience in organizing and structuring visual information continues to influence her current artistic practice.