UMI
I love these slightly strange 19th-century Japanese studies of marine life. The fish are beautifully observed and incredibly detailed, but there is nothing romanticised about them. In fact, they barely look alive. They have the unmistakable air of fish that are moments away from a sushi chef's knife.
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The original illustrations were presented against white, which I never thought quite worked as prints. They looked, quite literally, like fish out of water. So for UMI I placed them against this deep, slightly greyed Japanese indigo, inspired by the traditional aizome blues that have been used in Japanese textiles and decorative arts for centuries.
I absolutely adore this colour. It completely changes the images. Against the indigo, the creams, silvers, blacks and flashes of gold in the fish suddenly come alive, while the blue gives the individual prints a visual connection they never had before.
I have not yet added this collection to my own walls because I have been thinking about how I would like to present them. I'd be happy just to hang several together as a statement wall and let that extraordinary indigo do the work, but my current favourite idea is to combine different sized prints and hang amongst houseplants to create the illusion of the fish swimming through a reef. The plants becoming part of the composition would work brilliantly.
Kevin Baxter
London
August 2026
