Akiko Diegel: lost, lost property

Akiko Diegel: lost, lost property

Japanese-born artist Diegel lives and works in Auckland, her work often dealing with the realisation of existence: Things that are consumed, worn, worked, carried, forgotten or collected. This new installation explores the dichotomy of thought when encountering a piece of lost property in the environment and the visual experience and the mystery that this encounter evokes in the finder. Hanging from an internal fence in the gallery, the collection creates a visual feast of colour, texture and repetition of the pattern. Each item has been skillfully recreated by the artist to match a lost item seen and photographed by Diegel while walking.

“lost, lost property is the act of collecting information from the lost property on the street, and from photographs of such lost property, I create the missing half in order to create a whole. Ironically, the original property may, of course, have eventually been picked up by its proprietor and, if it is so, my new creation of the missing half will then never meet its other half and therefore, in itself, becomes lost property. This activity, in fact, becomes an almost contradictory allegory of the act of collecting. As there is no absolutely perfect world, either psychologically or physically, I continue to collect as an attempt to attain it.” Akiko Diegel