How Ayame Uchima makes delicate drawings that look just like lace

Growing up in Okinawa, Paris-based illustrator Ayame Uchima was captivated by the slow craft of making things by hand. “This has become the foundation of everything I make today,” she tells It’s Nice That. It wasn’t until the artist travelled to Paris in 2017 to train at École Lesage that she started working with lace, learning the highly specialised French technique of Lunéville embroidery. Following this course, Ayame relocated to Paris and “through an unexpected turn of events, came into possession of a complete set of bobbin lace-making tools”, she says. This chance event has steered the illustrator’s practice to date.

“I began attending a monthly lace club in the countryside, learning through the exchange of techniques between members, and working with the threads directly — feeling how patterns emerge from the crossing and interlocking of each strand,” she shares. This intricate hands-on work started to become inseparable from the artist’s drawings of imagined lace pieces – insanely intricate plans that she would plot out, “inspired by the mysterious beauty of ancient motifs and the stories they carry across centuries”.

Ayame sees her delicate lace drawings like pages in an imaginary storybook. “I want my work to act as a portal between the world we inhabit and somewhere that may or may not exist,” she says. This fairytale-like element to the artist’s work carries you elsewhere but it isn’t meant to put you completely at ease: “I am drawn to worlds that are beautiful and poetic on the surface, but where something quietly discordant hums beneath,” she says. “I find this quality in Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, Leo Lionni’s Parallel Botany and the films of Wes Anderson – a tenderness shadowed by unease, a sweetness that is never entirely at rest.”