Sakie Ogura

Sakie Ogura (小倉咲枝) is a Kyoto-based Japanese printmaker whose practice centres on copperplate etching and aquatint, with a quietly autobiographical sensibility that turns small domestic spaces — most often the dining room — into stages for an intimate inner theatre. Although she works in a medium long associated with Western fine-art printmaking, her sensibility is distinctly Japanese: the meditative attention to ordinary objects, the privacy of the room, and the pacing of light and shadow all draw on traditions much older than the etching needle.

Ogura trained as a Western-style painter, graduating from Kyoto University of Art and Design (京都芸術短期大学) in the Western Painting (Yōga) programme, where she received the Uryū Prize (瓜生賞), one of the school's principal awards for graduating work. Her path to copperplate engraving was unconventional: after graduation she worked as a designer for a children's clothing manufacturer in Kobe and lived overseas for periods in Bombay and Houston, only returning to a sustained studio practice when she joined the Kōbaicho Copperplate Print Workshop (紅梅町版画工房) in Kyoto in 2015. There she began to teach herself etching from scratch, and the workshop became the technical and social anchor for her artistic life.

The imagery in Ogura's prints is unmistakable. She works with the dining table as a recurring motif — sometimes empty, sometimes set, sometimes occupied by a single solitary cup or by the small accumulating objects of a domestic afternoon. Around these compositions she gathers fragments from a life lived alone or in quiet companionship: the ticking of a clock in an otherwise silent room, the small spider crawling across the wall, the slow swelling of a hyacinth's roots. The prose-poem statement on her website distils this sensibility precisely: 'In a room alone, listening to the ticking of a clock; naming the small spider crawling on the wall; waiting eagerly for hyacinth roots to emerge.' What might in other hands sound merely lyrical becomes, through the technical register of etching and aquatint, an exercise in noticing — slowness made visible.

Ogura's solo exhibitions to date include 'Arranged Soliloquy' (並べた独り言) at fei art gallery in Yokohama in 2022, 'Where I Am' (私の居るところ) at Gallery Arai in Koshien in 2023, and 'Desk Landscapes' (机上の風景) at the same gallery in 2025. She has been a regular awardee at the annual Japan Print Association exhibitions: she received the Encouragement Award at the 90th exhibition (2023), both the Encouragement Award and the Gallery Award at the 91st (2024), and the Shōji Kobayashi Jury Award (小林敬生賞) at the 92nd (2025). In 2021 she was selected as Runner-up at the FEI Print Award. Her print 'A Forest of Soliloquy' was selected for the inaugural Itabashi Botanical Print Biennial in 2023.

Internationally, Ogura has participated in the Japan-Korea Print Exchange Exhibition (2019), and her prints have been selected multiple times for the Cadaqués International Mini Print Exhibition in Spain and the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition in Tokushima between 2023 and 2025. The mini-print circuit, with its constraint on scale and its emphasis on tightly composed image-making, suits the intimate scope of her dining-room-based imagery particularly well.