Akio Makigawa

Akio Makigawa (1948-1999) was a Japanese-born Australian sculptor and printmaker whose work bridged Japanese aesthetic sensibilities with Australian materials and landscape. Born in Karatsu City, Saga Prefecture, Japan, in 1948, he travelled to Perth, Western Australia, in 1974 originally to study sail-making, with the intention of sailing around the world. Through his sailing community he met the Perth sculptor Tony Jones, also a yachtsman, who introduced him to sculpture and helped steer the direction of his second career.

Makigawa studied at Claremont, in Perth, and continued his formal training at Curtin University, completing a Bachelor of Arts/Fine Art. He later moved to Melbourne, where he completed a Graduate Diploma in sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts and lived and worked until his death in 1999. He held an earlier Bachelor of Arts from Nihon University, Tokyo. Having won scholarships to study gymnastics and physical education in his youth, he was successively a gymnast, a yachtsman, a sail-maker, a printmaker, and a sculptor -- biographical breadth that informed the precision and balance of the works he produced.

Makigawa's mature sculptural practice used primary natural materials -- stone, wood, marble, and steel -- in compositions that balance concrete physical presence with a sense of spiritual lightness. His major public commissions, in the international departure lounge at Melbourne Airport and at Melbourne Town Hall Plaza, show this principle at architectural scale, and he held solo exhibitions at public galleries and art institutions across Australia during his lifetime.

Alongside the public sculpture commissions, Makigawa maintained an etching practice, working with the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne to produce small-edition prints that translate the same sculptural vocabulary -- stone, water, memory, recollection -- into the intaglio register. His documented etching titles include 'Omoide I' and 'Omoide II' (1998, both editions of 30; 'omoide' translates as 'recollection' or 'memory') and works from his 'Study of Recollections' / 'Recollections of Memory' cycle, continuing into 1999. The etchings are hand-pulled on paper at small to medium scale.

His work is held in major Australian public collections, including the McClelland Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. The monograph on Makigawa by Jackie Cooper (Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2013) is the primary print reference, and the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition 'Akio Makigawa: Spirit and Memory' subsequently surveyed his career.

His death in 1999, at the age of fifty-one, cut short an active practice; his widow, the contemporary jeweller and metalsmith Carlier Makigawa, has continued to steward his artistic legacy. Makigawa qualifies as a Japanese-Australian printmaker whose etchings -- though a smaller part of his practice than his sculpture -- circulate as recognised editions through Australian galleries, and his Japanese birth and aesthetic vocabulary are core to his artistic identity.