Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka

Tom Thomson Shack Artist Residency 
By John Geoghegan, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Sarah Milroy
Softcover, 52 Pages
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024

In June 2024, Toronto-based artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka (b. 1988) undertook an artist residency in the historic Tom Thomson Shack at the McMichael. The resulting project, Final Gasp of the Nervous System, responds to the natural environment and evokes personal and collective resilience in response to mental health struggles and the looming climate crisis. Using traditional Japanese washi paper and other handmade paper from southeast Asia, Hatanaka’s works combine various printmaking, dyeing, and painting techniques.

About Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka is a Japanese-Canadian, queer and disabled artist based in Toronto, an identity that sculpts her practice. Hatanaka draws from her training in print and papermaking techniques, connecting to her intentional use of historical land-based materials and processes. Her adaptations of traditions, in the form of large-scale print installations and wearable sculptures, address contemporary questions of climate change, mental health, and survival. Recurring motifs related to landscape, fish, and bodies of water together speak about personal and collective experiences of struggle and resilience.

Hatanaka’s practice is informed by her experience-based research and collaboration, including long term community-engaged projects in the high Arctic, and performances that integrate and reinterpret kamiko, garments sewn out of washi, Japanese paper.

Hatanaka has exhibited her work at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, CA), The British Museum (London, UK), Toronto Biennial of Art (Toronto, CA) the Guanlan International Printmaking Base (Shenzhen, China), Nikkei National Museum (Burnaby, CA), Ino Cho Paper Museum (Kochi, Japan), and Harper’s (New York, USA).