Mika Yoshizawa pushes her choice of media beyond what has traditionally been perceived as 'drawing'. Her works cross the boundary of strict media classifications and could equally be regarded as paintings. Yoshizawa has said:

When I went to take in the washing, I found a spider's thread woven through it. I felt sorry for the spider, but I really could not have it weaving its web in my washing. After I had taken in the washing I wondered if the spider kept on spinning its web. I wonder how the spider spins the very first thread; I imagine it somehow makes the second one by holding on to the first. Spiders can't fly: does it trail the first thread behind and ride the wind until it gets caught somewhere? Before the spider began to spin its web there, I never gave the washing or the gaps in the window frame a second thought, then after the spider had spun several threads I wondered at the strange shapes that they made. I had thought that there was nothing there, only air, so I couldn't see them. The spider by spinning its web had made them visible, but these strange shapes had been there all the time. Although the first thread had been left up to the wind, while it drifted it may have chosen a path of air that the insects, which would become the spider's prey, would most naturally travel.

'Still, I'm no expert, so I don't know. When I make things I never base them on any particular concrete image, yet other people look at my completed works and see all manner of things. Some see cars and propellers, others see rockets or squid or whales. Come to think of it, all of these things are made to travel easily through air or water, so I can see what they mean. A long time ago, when I was painting cups and irons and other things, I started to become engrossed in painting not the cup, but the air surrounding it. That is why my work has evolved to the way it is, although this is not the only reason, but it's also difficult to explain. Perhaps I am like the spider who is searching paths in the air.

It is like shape, it is like a pattern, it appears to have depth, but it is flat, it's like a surface, but it has a feeling of substance. Why is it like that you ask? I don't understand this thing called painting, so I look for the border lines, then I circle around it on tiptoe.¹

Endnote

1. Yoshizawa, Mika [artist statement] in Japanese Ways, Western Means: Art of the 1980s in Japan [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, p.64.