Luna Ikuta

I just came back to LA so I’m getting acclimated. I was in Barcelona last month before the opening and then in Paris and then Thailand for two weeks. I just got back.

Most people usually assume it’s CGI or some type of 3D rendering initially. That’s always the common misconception that people have—that they’re not actually real plants. When I make them into digital artworks, I remove the actual analogue system that’s making everything move and happen, like the tanks, the water, and the filtration system, and then it’s on a black background so you really see this void and then the real plant. But everything is analogue—the lighting, the water, the movement. People think it’s an animation, but it’s all film. It turns into something else within the digital work versus when I do a physical installation and people can see it in real life. So I like having those two separate experiences.

I always expect that there's something that's going to go wrong with any large installation or build or production process because it's just the way things are. And I think that the more I've done this, the more I’ve accepted that as a reality. So what I mean by being flexible to change is that I’ve been doing all of these installs on my own for so long that when it comes into a larger scale, what's been really consistent is knowing okay, if A doesn't work, there's a plan B. If B doesn’t work, there’s a plan C. Or I'll just figure out how to make the puzzle pieces work, even though it's not my initial idea. I think that holds true for every single project. It's never, ever been exactly how I imagined it would be, but it ends up becoming either better, or I just end up having newer ideas. I start to work better within constraints as well.

No, it was not RISD. I studied Industrial Design there, so my main interest has always been how to make things. The decellularisation process actually stemmed from when, a few years ago online, I saw this flower called the Diphylleia Grayi—it’s also called a skeleton flower. It naturally turns transparent when it’s wet, so that was the initial spark.
The way I work is I’ll find something that stimulates some type of exciting feeling and I'll go into why it happens, breaking down what's going on and then trying to recreate it myself. As an industrial designer, I'm so used to making materials look like nature or feel like nature. We're always trying to find some way to create that harmony with nature and what's humanmade. And then that flower looked like glass. So it was inverse—I'm used to working the other way around. That's what got me into studying exactly what was happening in the anatomy of that flower and into a biology hole, discovering specifically what's going on and how that's happening and then trying to recreate it in an artificial way.

I was just doing photos and film in the beginning and putting all of that on YouTube like a standard way of going about it. One friend reached out to me one day and said I should look into NFTs. This was in 2019, so before blockchain NFTs were on the news or anyone’s big trend. I had that feeling that it was a very weird but niche thing where people were archiving digital works on blockchain. At the time, because I'm not really a film person, I was realising how cumbersome having hard drives was. I thought this was a very interesting way to archive digital media, so I thought of blockchain and NFTs as this a giant hard drive, and that's how I started to go into it.
With being so saturated in Instagram or putting your stuff online and everyone being able to see it, there's almost this materiality to NFTs that I was drawn to. Just the fact that you can have a timestamp, you can put your own identity to it. There's a bit more weight to a digital asset than there is solely posting something online, so I was also drawn to that. A lot of the work was about preserving this ephemeral plant through film and I thought blockchain was another extension of that. And then it blew up.

It depends on the project. When it's overseas, I'll have help with installation or when it comes to fabrication, like outsourcing it to vendors. But for the first few years, when I was doing this in my own studio, setting up the tanks, doing everything, all of the actual installation of the plants and the creation of the work that you saw was typically made by me. And then any of the external larger stuff — for example at a museum in China, I have these crystal blocks. Things like that are outsourced and then built according to a plan that I'll draw out.
It depends on the project and the scale, but I really love collaborating with artisans who can help me with producing larger scale pieces, whether it's glassblowing or creating custom tanks. When it comes to making custom, then of course I'll work with people.

I think it goes back and forth for me a lot. I'm definitely visually driven. I know what I feel looks good. That's something that just comes instinctually for me, in terms of material choices or form or composition or things like that. Most of my work is based on concepts or what that material feels like to me. Having worked in a very analogue way for so long, I always feel like I'm trying to find some type of parallel between human emotions and the materials. We're so sensitive to things like colour, temperature, weight, texture. I think they all give off a certain feeling when we're interacting with objects around us. So I've been really sensitive to figure out what the concept is that I'm trying to create physically. And then how can I use all of the mediums around me to help express that in a very visceral way?

Starting a project like that comes from just sourcing the actual plant in itself and then it goes through this chemical process. A lot of the time you don’t really know how it's going to end up. You have to go through a bunch of wash cycles and over the course of three weeks or so you have to maintain it. And essentially at the end you start to install inside the actual tank itself. Everything is all done by me. It's very similar to aquascaping where you're then taking the plant and then gardening it underwater. It really feels like a mad scientist type of experience.

A lot of the work has evolved over the past years, depending on what medium I'm using at that time. The resin pieces were in 2018, 2019 or something in that era. That work was really process based, trying to find this silence within myself. So the large circular pieces, for example, were all just hand-sculpted works with the Jyaku series. And then the Urushi Uni, that was a play on this form, the concept of form, material, and what the object represents.
I've always been really drawn to sea urchins because I loved how conceptually it's this 360 form of armour, but they're extremely fragile in real life. So there's that paradox and then putting it on these obsidian stones and creating a sculpture that was more of a symbolic nod to what's protection, what's armour, and trying to find concepts like that. So that was just me playing around with ideas of how to use mediums and materials, again, to express human feelings with something that is non-sentient.

I always love jumping around and working with different materials because they all have these limitations. I like to think of these as also characteristics. That's always been fun to put into concept. A lot of the past work I was doing was definitely just me sketching around, how I can put together an idea, the material limitations, and the concept and how they all work together. So it's always been an exercise of jumping around from different mediums, even with the resin. It's this super synthetic plastic-like thing, but that has different strengths than something that's more delicate, like an actual organic material. And that has different strengths than something with glass, but they all have characteristics that I feel are somewhat parallel to how humans are in a way, if you just take it from a very objective lens.
I think that's what really always draws me to wanting to try different mediums, because it makes me think, what character, what persona is this medium? And then over time, I don't really realise it, of course, while I’m making it, but looking back at all the work, it's interesting when I see that this somehow belongs together as a family. Even though they're all different and the process of making everything is so different.

It's definitely super connected. That was one of my first real jobs out of college, in furniture and lighting design. I thought that was my dream job when I graduated. So being in that position, it was logistically really great in the sense that I was able to have confidence in seeing something from idea to sketch, to production, to finish, to install, actually seeing the whole thing. What I was really drawn to and what I really started to notice was how certain textures, materials or finishes create ambiance. It's an atmospheric thing that you're trying to create.
Depending on what colour palette, what chairs, what styles, what shapes, what you're really doing is trying to create this empty box, but then fill it in with stuff to give it a character, a feeling. I took that to translate it into, what kind of world can I build with my own work? The interior design job inspired me or made me realise how much more I'm interested in world building and how I can take concepts and apply world building to them, but do it through art.

It's funny you say that. Yeah, right now at this point in my life, I do. I do miss certain levels of consistency and I always wonder whether or not that's consistency with having just like a job that's secure, or if it's just consistency within myself. A lot of this art trajectory, it's so nonlinear, there's no guarantee, you're basically fighting against — a lot of it has to do with yourself too. Just having the belief and the confidence that everything you're doing is because you really want to. You sacrifice a lot of stability and you're going against your own insecurities or self doubt, and have to fight that every single day.
There are always days where you don't know what's going to happen next. Or even if you just did a show, you don't necessarily have another one lined up, you don't know what your next project is going to be, or you have lulls of inspiration. That's just a normal thing that I think I've come to accept. So whenever there are moments of lows, I'm always like, God, it would be nice to have consistency or to go back to that. But then, as I've been doing this, I've also come to fully believe that it all lines up eventually. I've come to accept that there's a lot of flexibility in how you achieve what you really want to achieve. So even though I might have this big vision within myself, it might take different paths to get there versus what I expected it to be.
That's similar to how I look at installations or large projects. I think the older I've gotten, the more I've been in this world of being this independent artist, and the less I've become attached to that identity of what it means to be an artist or what it means to be working as an artist full time. I think that's been one of the biggest struggles — detaching from what you think it's supposed to look like. And then wanting to always add and grow versus trying to stay in one idea. You know, whenever you don't know exactly what's ahead of you, be sure to follow an instinct. That's what usually drives everything that feels true and good. So I think the inconsistency and the chaos and the not knowing within the first few years, it made me really believe that I just need to follow this instinct and everything will work out.

I haven't regretted any project necessarily. There's definitely stuff I would like to change, but no regrets. I think every single one has always made me want to tear my hair out at certain points, but you just learn. Some of the earlier installations I look back at now being like, oh my God, I would never do that ever again or that does not look as good as I thought it did. I don't want to forget it happened, but also, it might look like that because I had so much trouble with this and now I know.

Yeah. My teenage self, but even my two-years ago-self. I think the thing that’s most surprising has just been all the people that I've been able to work with, the places I've been able to show, and the types of autonomy I've been able to have. I never thought this unconventional type of work with the decellularization of plants, going into digital art, would be anywhere near what I was doing. I didn’t even think I was going to be an artist as a teenager.