Taro Shonida is a self-taught artist who originally trained in Japanese landscape gardening before pursuing a visual arts career. This interest in nature and humanity’s relationship to different habitats still fuels his practice. Working across a range of media such as kinetic sculpture, cyanotypes and oil paintings, Shonida uses these materials to trace the ever evolving and porous dynamics between planet earth and mankind. Shinoda is keen to think and work across disciplines, cosmology, physics and philosophy are all crucial ingredients for example within his research. He cites the great polymath Richard Buckminster Fuller as a pivotal influence upon his artistic approach. Fuller labelled our planet as “spaceship earth”, and Shonida similarly uses his visual art practice as a vehicle to explore the countless adventures that take place within our natural world. The works have an infectious sense of curiosity and playfulness about them, with Shonida rendering outlines of mountains, stars or foliage in washes of ink or in ladened oil brushstrokes. Sensitive and magnetic, Shonida’s works manage to strike right at the core of ecology’s innate beauty and power. ...
