Mari Katayama’s self-portraits often depict her within the centre of painstakingly arranged objects, either in intimate bedroom spaces or in vast and awe-inspiring landscapes. The objects vary in every bit; nonetheless, specific motifs constantly pop up, particularly, crabs, paying homage amongst other things to her star sign (cancer). You may even see handmade pillow-like objects in the form of limbs and mannequins. But no matter where she is, or what she surrounds herself with, the principal subject of her work is her, most notably her body. 

Well, that’s how you might be made to feel anyway, but Mari explains her work is all about experiences. “It just isn’t in regards to the body itself, but more in regards to the gap of the “experiences” throughout my body that I’m concerned about. Things reminiscent of memories,” she says.

Raised in Gunma Prefecture, an industrial area in Japan just a few hours outside Tokyo, Katayama was born with tibial hemimelia – a rare disease that in Katayama’s case has prevented growth within the lower legs in addition to causing a cleft left hand that resembles a crab’s pincers – hence the twin meaning underscoring the crab motifs. Katayama’s battle with this illness is something that inspired creativity in her at a young age and is something that also heavily influences her work today.

Spending most of her pre-educational years in hospital, it was only when she went to elementary school that her perceived differences set her apart. “It was the very first time I felt different or isolated,” she shares. Her disability meant that Katayama couldn’t wear regular clothes like the opposite pupils at her school, which accentuated her differences. Encouraged by the ladies in her family to make her own clothes, DIY became a cornerstone in Katayama’s outlook on life. “[My mother] at all times taught me if anything is missing, I ought to be answerable for making them by myself,” she says. “I grew up in that type of environment where the DIY mentality is treated as common sense.” And this shines through in her work, what together with her heavy DIY aesthetic. Take You’re Mine #002, for instance, where she makes a plaster forged mould of her body, then covers it in a hand-sewn patchwork leather ‘skin’, in addition to fashioning a wig for the mannequin out of her own hair.

At nine years old Katayama had her legs amputated – a choice that enabled her to walk with a prosthetic leg which meant she could wear regular clothes. Nonetheless, she was still bullied. Despite this, she began using her body as a canvas, painting tattoo-like designs on her prosthetics. Looking for solace in art and starting to perceive it as a viable profession, Mari won first place within the Gunma Biennale for Young Artists on the age of 16, catching the attention of Takashi Azumaya, a renowned art curator in Japan. Since this, Mari has gone on to win the Tokyo Marunouchi Grand Prize Art Award, participated within the Aichi Triennale, have two critically acclaimed retrospective shows, modelled and appeared in TV shows and dramas.

With numerous her work taking cues and inspiration from art history, reminiscent of Botticelli’s Venus and John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, Mari’s work constantly scrutinises our traditional perceptions of beauty in romantic and nuanced ways. Mari’s conversation with the body through her art is beautifully apparent. But her intention just isn’t to be beautiful, it’s to indicate the body in all its purity, in its idiosyncratic deformations, and in its appealing rawness. “One thing I do know obviously is that beauty just isn’t something good-looking or clean,” she says. “I personally feel that anything that’s alive is gorgeous…I don’t intend to create something beautiful in the primary place.”