{"id":737,"date":"2024-10-30T14:53:19","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T13:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/?page_id=737"},"modified":"2026-06-11T17:48:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T15:48:57","slug":"737-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/737-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This portfolio includes a selection of work that exemplifies my transdisciplinary and intermedia methods. Thematically, the work included deals with the question of belonging\u2014national, institutional, ecological, and artistic. The work demonstrates my range across forms and media, including comics, animation, essays, performance, and artist publishing, and shows how I work iteratively across these forms\/media, allowing the capacities of each to extend my work in its own way. Finally, this portfolio shows how I use observational practice as the ground of my approach to nonfiction. All my work\u2014both teaching and writing\u2014comes from careful, nearly endless attention to detail\u2014the detail of social structure, the detail of narrative form, the detail of the living world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have always been a writer, but I have also always been a picture-maker: the earliest drawings I made were letters, or became letters, and the earliest letters I wrote were shapes I was later taught to see as the elements of my name. And so making image-text combinations has always felt natural to me, and the question of relationships between images and language remains central to my work, manifesting in many ways including the development of image-text syntax, making comics, and keeping documentary and annotative records of my walking practice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This relationship was cemented during my MFA, when I studied both creative writing and art (minoring in studio arts, I took classes in printmaking, book arts, and art theory). It has developed in the classroom, where I work with students whose lives are saturated with visuality. Images and text in conjunction suggest breadth and possibility of meaning; that conjunction changes how I imagine what it means to write and to draw. Image+text also reminds me that there are always multiple ways to capture any experience, and that the act of observation is situated and mediated. This has led me to work ideas out as printmakers do, through a process of extensive repetition and iteration, making multiples and allowing meaning to emerge through response to slight changes over time. My practices of writing and image-making often meet in book forms\u2014both the books I publish and the ones I make by hand, sometimes in the same classrooms where other human beings help me think through what we mean when we say “writing” or “drawing” or “book” or “essay” or “poem”. The handmade book is an ideal form for iterative thinking, because editions demand iteration, and also because the slow time of production and binding opens space for certain kinds of thought that are possible when one’s hands are occupied with repetitive work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What follows is an example of the way my iterative process works. The pieces presented and linked here are facets of one polyhedron\u2014call it ‘belonging’ or ‘immigration’ or ‘diaspora’. Together they offer a representative sample of how I work my ideas out across media and in language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Being Here” (2022) was selected by a jury of comics artists for inclusion in HOME<\/a><\/em>, an anthology about the complexities of belonging in contemporary Ireland. Collage is one way I build images and work on the page in sequential narrative. “Being Here” also relies on drawings made as part of my walking and observational practice, the basis for much of my work.<\/p>\n\n\n

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In 2023, I made an animated version of “Being Here” as part of Long Dark Nights,<\/a> a Dublin-based comic arts event that took place online. The animated version of “Being Here” came out of my thinking about presenting and performing writing over the internet that began in the early part of the pandemic and continues to be a live question for me. How can we make text-objects and performances that can feel “live” across the distance of the internet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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