Giant Waves (Coventry Cathedral)

A site-specific installation produced for Coventry Cathedral during the 2021 UK City of Culture year. The wave is a long-standing motif in Japanese visual culture, codified in Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa and extended through generations of subsequent printmakers; Imada's Giant Waves engages that lineage while transposing it into the post-war modernist nave designed by Basil Spence. Installations of this scale typically rely on woodblock-printed sheets of [washi](/glossary/washi) or related papers, hung or layered so that the rhythm of the wave reads at architectural distance rather than at the close range of a framed sheet. The Cathedral, built alongside the ruin of its medieval predecessor, supplies a setting in which themes of destruction, memory, and renewal converge—qualities that the wave, long associated in Japanese tradition with both threat and cyclical return, can carry directly. The commission represents a substantive point in Imada's project of bringing mokuhanga vocabulary into UK ecclesiastical and civic architecture.