The Eclipse of Darkness

There are various black colors such as black paint, black ink, sumi ink, and lacquer, but the black produced by Ibuki is a black created by chemically changing metallic foils, mainly silver foils, with sulfur.

The discolored metallic foils are corroded and decayed with time, evoking the passage of time. The jet black that is then created has a fading beauty.

There are not many painters who create paintings with metallic foil as the main subject like Ibuki. It can be said that this is a rare work of painting.

The town where Ibuki grew up was a small country town, so it was a stifling world with a sense of entrapment, full of old customs and dominant people who stuck to their own opinions. She also ponders "is the passage of time a person's degeneration or evolution" in her relationships with friends and family. It is a fine line between "degeneration and evolution," including her self, and depending on how you look at it, it can be taken either way.

From there, she created a painting of the conflicting worlds of "the black world degenerating with the passage of time" and, on the contrary, "the white world evolving with hope and freedom for the future.

Ibuki was strongly influenced by Gustave Moreau and Max Ernst, and created many of her works with the "decalcomania" and "wet-in-wet" expressions she had developed in watercolor and oil painting.

The abstract expression of her work is characterized by the combination of the chemical discoloration of metallic foil with it.