Rondo: Makiko Nakamura

 Throughout her fourteen years in Ireland and ever since her return to Japan in 2013, Makiko Nakamura’s studio practice has remained constant. She refers to her canvases as her ‘slow paintings’, each one following the same steady process over several months: a single, repeating pattern or a block of colour left to dry before being overpainted with another and another, until she stops painting and begins to work her way back through the different layers with fine sandpaper. Her tightly controlled technique is like archaeology, she says. The emotional and artistic decisions of preceding months, once covered, reappearing as tantalising glimpses through the painting’s history.