About the artwork

Tokamachi has a long tradition of silk fabrics and kimonos. So we interpreted the concept of “kimono” not only as Japanese clothing, but also applied it for more general “clothes” and tried to dress on various objects in town. The first candidate which we immediately thought was the “utility pole”. Although they are little noticed, they are the eyesores in terms of landscape. We wished local residents to rediscover their own town by dressing various clothes. We might be able to improve the present landscape dramatically by making very minor changes . We planned dressing not only utility poles but street lights as well. In terms of dressing street lights, all street lights in one street extended over 300m were covered with “Unikko pattern” designed by Maija Isola under the full cooperation of the marimekko Corporation in Finland.