About — Yukie Ohta

Photo by Nick Mango Photography

Yukie Ohta is a New York–based artist, archivist, and writer whose work explores stillness, repetition, and the quiet intervals embedded within everyday urban life. She is the founder of the SoHo Memory Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating and preserving the history of artists’ SoHo, reflecting her long-standing engagement with place, memory, and cultural continuity.

Living and working in SoHo for most of her life, Ohta draws sustained inspiration from the neighborhood’s cast-iron architecture and the rhythms it creates amid the intensity of the city. These structures—defined by repeated forms, narrow passages of sky, and enduring material presence—serve as both a visual and emotional framework for her practice.

A multi-medium fiber artist, Ohta has worked extensively with fabric and paper. In July 2022, she was an artist-in-residence at Lost and Found Lab, an invitation-only, one-person residency where she developed concepts that led her to her current primary medium: thread. Through repetitive, time-based processes and the use of negative space, her work invites slow looking and contemplative engagement, offering moments of calm and focus within environments shaped by noise and acceleration.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My series Intervals invites a slowing down—a deepened breath and an attentiveness to the quiet spaces in everyday life that are so often overlooked. These works ask the viewer to pause, to linger, and to enter a state of focused looking where subtle shifts, repetitions, and absences become as meaningful as presence.

All my life, I have lived and worked in SoHo, a bustling neighborhood in New York City defined by constant movement, noise, and visual saturation. Moving through its crowded streets can be overwhelming. To find relief, I often pause and look upward. Above the storefronts and traffic, a narrow slice of sky opens between the cast-iron buildings for which the neighborhood is known.

These structures are more than my built environment; they form an internal landscape from which I draw strength, comfort, and calm. Their architectural elements—columns, arches, and windows cast from molds and repeated across façades—establish a steady rhythm that echoes breathing, footsteps, or the measured passage of time. In their quiet permanence, they offer an antidote to the sensory intensity of the city below.

In Intervals, I translate this experience into a tactile, visual language through the use of thread, repetition, and negative space. Thread becomes both line and structure, marking presence while simultaneously revealing absence. The spaces between lines—the intervals—are as important as the lines themselves, allowing light, air, and silence to enter the work. These gaps create moments of rest for the eye and invite sustained, contemplative looking.

The process itself is meditative and time-based. Repetitive handwork mirrors the rhythms I observe in architecture and daily life, slowing my own pace and embedding time into the surface of the work. Through this deliberate making, I seek to create an oasis of stillness within the noise of everyday life—a space where viewers can experience calm, focus, and quiet attention.

Ultimately, Intervals is about finding balance: between chaos and order, presence and absence, movement and pause. By offering a place for the eye to rest and the mind to settle, the work encourages a renewed awareness of the subtle structures that shape both our environments and our inner lives.