Yodogawa Girl
Atleigh Homma

​

Exhibition text by Kesang Nanglu

​

Inherited fabrics and family photographs are at the centre of Yodogawa Girl, a new body of work by Toronto-based artist Atleigh Homma. Through them, Homma pieces together family histories to form a portrait of her paternal grandmother.

 

The textile works draw on fabrics inherited from her grandmother, including aprons made from rice bags—a utilitarian material commonly found in Japanese households. These acts of reuse situate her practice within a broader lineage of women’s handicraft traditions in which modest, readily available materials are transformed into objects of necessity and care.

 

Rose Apron Quilt is constructed from rice bags sewn into a quilted apron and overlaid with a sprawling rose appliqué made from vintage tablecloths. Spread open like an unfolding landscape, its white and beige surface is paper-like, evoking illustrated fans and botanical woodblock prints. The rose motif, referencing Kokuho Rose, a popular Japanese rice variety, grows, twists, and blooms across the apron.

 

Like the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama who assembled quilts from worn workwear and food sacks, Homma’s ancestors worked resourcefully within conditions of constraint. By extension, her textile works are both functional and commemorative, honoring the loved ones who preserved them through their careful renewal.

​

Made from futon covers, the three salmon in Salmon Quilt swim across the surface of the quilt, their heads oriented left and right. The fish appear at once to be navigating their way forward and to be suspended, as if caught within a net—reinforced by the stitched grid of quilting and the printed lines of the vintage tablecloth that forms the background, together producing the impression of entanglement.

​

In Japan, carp-shaped streamers, or koinobori, are flown to wish for children’s good health and happiness, with koi traditionally symbolizing strength and resilience. Homma’s Salmon Pillow echoes this form, hanging vertically like a streamer. The salmon also reference British Columbia, where Homma’s paternal ancestors settled, connecting the work to both ancestral symbolism and histories of migration, labour, and perseverance.

​

Just as her textile works repurpose fabrics, Homma’s paintings use family photographs as another site of inquiry and understanding. Roland Barthes’ wrote that “every photograph is a certificate of presence”—a record of time and evidence of existence. Painting from these photographs becomes a gesture of dedication: a careful act of study that reaffirms and creates connection with lives otherwise accessible only through fragments.

​

Dancing 1 and Dancing 2 are presented side-by-side as a diptych, mirroring the way Homma first encountered them in a family photo album, underscoring the act of looking as one shaped by proximity, sequence, and memory.

​

The paintings capture the material traces of analogue film—its grain, colour cast, and overexposed flash—serving as points of emotional entry that extend beyond personal history and resonate with shared experiences of time, presence, and loss.

 

Similarly, Terry reads at first glance like an old photograph. Its large-scale and black-and-white palette recalls Gerhard Richter’s paintings based on newspaper clippings; yet whereas Richter treats his subjects as anonymous, Homma’s subject—her grandmother—is singular and essential.

 

By presenting her grandmother at this scale, Homma insists on the importance of a life shaped by struggle and care, lived largely outside the frame of history. The painting invites us to bear witness to a woman whose life unfolded against the backdrop of Japanese internment and economic hardship, while also holding space for resilience and joy.

 

At home, she is dressed for her birthday, with a cake on the table and chopsticks set nearby. These everyday markers of celebration and routine ground the work in lived experience. In reckoning with histories of oppression and inherited trauma, Terry functions as an act of recognition, honouring the women in Homma’s family and asking us to consider who is seen, remembered, and monumentalized.

 

For Homma, memory is held in cloth. Fabrics once set aside resurface, photographs once tucked away demand attention, and through their careful transformation, relationships reassert themselves across time. Yodogawa Girl affirms that inheritance is not passive. It is activated through touch, through looking, and through receiving what has been passed down and carrying it forward with renewed meaning.

 

​