Rinko Kawauchi, At the Edge of the Everyday World

BRISTOL: ARNOLFINI, 2024

For her retrospective at Arnolfini in Bristol, At the edge of the everyday world (19 October 2024 - 16 February 2025), I contributed an essay, “The Butterfly Effect”, on Rinko Kawauchi’s work, the first I’ve had the opportunity to write about her unique photographic practice.

Publisher description: Published alongside the Rinko Kawauchi exhibition At the Edge of the Everyday World, part of Bristol Photo Festival 2024, this book celebrates twenty years of extraordinary practice by internationally acclaimed Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972), exploring the beauty found within our everyday lives. Kawauchi’s work is intimate and tender, yet also monumental and sublime, moving between beauty and awe, reminding us how near yet how far lie the edges of our world. It is these edges she seeks to explore through her innate need to know the
world.

Drawing together four photographic series (Illuminance, AILA, Ametsuchi and M/E) alongside film and examples of her pioneering photobooks, the exhibition highlights the small, personal movements within our lives that lead to larger, universal journeys. In this way Kawauchi’s work touches upon Bristol Photo Festival’s wider theme of continual movement which makes ‘the world a wave’.