Corinne Okada Takara

Corinne Takara is Honolulu based artist/STEAM educator who creates technology integrated art projects. Her public collaborative work explores the use of modern day artifacts to preserve cultural heritage and memory, and honors the colliding and merging stories that arise in rapidly shifting communities. The workshops Takara designs for museums, libraries, K-12 classrooms and colleges foster creative confidence; they encourage us to see ourselves as drivers of culture and technology. By engaging in maker activities taking shape in public spaces, we can share creative ideas that impact our world and increase our collective civic engagement.

 Where Are We? Who Are We? Finding Our Roots & Identity in Public Art, TEDx Livermore, CA, 2014

Artist Bio for Sculptural Works:

Where are we? I wondered this as a child on many car trips during my family’s frequent moves across the country. It was not the sign posts that gave me a sense of place, but rather, the visual cues of neighborhoods drifting past the window, such as a lone sunflower nodding behind a picket fence, or a tire swing suspended between bird cages and a faded piñata . Having the blended heritage of Japanese from Hawaii and Irish from Tennessee, I have always found comfort and wonder in exploring place and belonging through the rich visual cues around me.

My art ranges from textile mixed media wall hangings, to fungus grown chandeliers, to 3D printed sculptures. My creative process starts with stories and questions that anchor to place, history and nature. The resulting art is often a blending of hand crafted and digitally created components. I am interested in exploring our relationship with our built and natural environments and how our relationship with the environment impacts our perspective on place and community. I believe that by blending new media tools with traditional patterns and hand techniques, we can reflect on identity from different angles.

Many of my installations include public participatory workshops inviting the public to also express themselves using the same media. By incorporating public participatory components into my installations, I strive to expand my empathy and ability to articulate engaging questions that help bind us with a sense of community through creative exploration.