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What did you learn about your work during the residency?

I learned that not everything I create needs to necessarily be attached to a brief or a commercial purpose. As it was a quiet month for work anyway, I used the time to just draw subject matters around my personal interests, the things I saw and what I was reading about. I let myself experiment with tools and processes that I had previously discarded, due to thinking that they would be too time-consuming. 

Having had all this space to immerse myself in a different and somewhat slower way of working, l learned that the time involved wasn’t wasted time at all, but instead made me connect to the work in even a deeper way. It turns out I’m much more drawn to the subtle colours and texture variations I could create with the way certain materials interact with the paper. Although this seems obvious, the hand-made quality that I usually try to recreate digitally just happens naturally when working with coloured pencils or watercolours. Working with colour in this way became a lot more intuitive and the process itself more playful and experimental. Additionally, removing the ability to go ctr-z on my work, eliminates unnecessary editing and makes me create something I like quicker and more efficiently. 

L: Sketchbook drawing in colour pencil
R: Pastel drawing on paper

Monoprint

Did the experience of being in Tlalpan shape what you created?

Due to the warm and sunny weather, I spent most of my days outside and ended up mostly drawing from observation. I drew a lot of nature and people in motion, which led to a full sketchbook, as well as a series of drawings of dancers immersed in natural environments. As a dancer myself, I had never combined my visual work with my passion for movement and it was on this residency that I learned I could do that. 

I attended a lot of dance classes and free dance events on the plaza in my neighbourhood, where I got to participate and also draw while being in the space. I then took these sketches back to the studio and worked them into more elaborate pieces.

Scroll of dancers in motion 

What did you decide to exhib at the end?

I brought a lot of the drawings I had done in the studio to a local print workshop where I developed them further into mono-prints and a couple of etchings. The exhibition therefore showed a mix of prints, drawings, sketchbook pages and a very long scroll of dancers in motion. I was asked to present my work verbally at the private view, where I got to explain the above in much more detail, talk about my processes and the idea behind each piece.

Lena's work on show at El Sur

Has the experience given you impetus to explore anything further?

I’ve realised that my illustrations and drawings don’t need to predominately be of static subject matter, but can record an abundance of things, even other arts, outside of the visual. Having worked with language and translation in the past where I would visualise words, concepts and emotions, I started to think about recording movement, such as dance, and more recently even sound.

I’m currently working on really exciting project in collaboration with the English National Opera. I got invited to one of their recording sessions to draw one of their newest compositions by making sound visible. Realising that drawing doesn’t solely have to visually represent something visual, is opening up an opportunity to look at translation from a different angle again, which is really exciting.

Monoprint

Links

About Lena Yokoyama

Lena is a Japanese / Austrian illustrator and printmaker based in London. Her optimistic and playful illustrations feature characters of different shapes and sizes, with use of plentiful colour and texture. Working across a broad range of mediums, her clients include The Tate, the ENO, Mondo Brewery, The Guardian and Red Bull to name but a few.

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