Artists Panel Discussion: Gilded

Featured Gilded artists Larissa Bates, Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, and Summer Wheat come together to share their distinct techniques for working with gold leaf and to talk about how they use this precious material to address a breadth of themes in their work, from history to literature to the environment.

Larissa Bates explores histories of colonialism in Latin American and their intersections with her own family history anchored in both the United States and Costa Rica. With a range of references from the 20th-century writings of Jamaica Kincaid to the 17th-century trade of Japanese folding screens, her complex gilded paintings pose rich questions about cross-cultural encounters.

Collecting debris from abandoned places—deconsecrated churches, defunct mines, archaeological sites, and fossil beds—Shinji Turner-Yamamoto works a deliberate alchemy to transform these neglected remnants into jewellike objects worthy of a viewer’s attention. Working with both studio-grown crystals and meticulously applied gold leaf, he honors that which we might bypass or destroy.

Throughout her work, Summer Wheat addresses themes of labor and its values, most often through dynamic tableaus of female figures in productive motion. Her painting process is just as laborious as the scenes she creates. Working from the back of large sheets of aluminum mesh, she presses her paint through its holes to form a textile-like surface, which is then meticulously gilded.

Larrissa Bates photo: courtesy of Jami Saunders; Shinji Turner-Yamamoto photo: Kohler Co: Courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.