TRAMPOLINE

Trampoline was born in a rural town in Kyoto. She drew so much at her grandparents’ house from about the age of five that they cut her paper into ten-centimetre squares. She studied typography at Kyoto University of the Arts, left at nineteen, worked ordinary jobs, and only came back to pictures in earnest after her first son was born. “I rediscovered the interest in expressing my daily life and resumed production,” she told It’s Nice That in October 2021, when she was still living in Tokyo. “There is certainly a desire to entertain.”

She does not go hunting for subjects. “I write down words that interest me,” she said, listing them in a line until a sentence appears, then building a simple image from that. Composition follows the words; detail comes later; colour is decided while the pencil is already moving. “The completed drawing is unknown until the end.” Japanese city pop, rock, alternative comics and animated shorts sit in the mix, and so does a child’s chaotic energy, translated into still frames full of funny bodies and bright noise.

The Tokyo shows are now dates, not promises. Her first solo exhibition, Animals, stay still, ran at TOKYO PiXEL from 17 to 29 March 2021: twenty-one new works, all Risograph, by an artist then listed as Kyoto-born and Tokyo-based. In May 2023 the same gallery hosted SOUP, originals in the first half, Risograph and her first silkscreen in the second. A 2024 interview in ZAK finds her back in Kyoto, living and working as a painter with two children, still on Risograph and silkscreen. Toy-like motifs; figures somewhere between living and inorganic, on separate layers. About seventy percent of the work is commercial now, much of it music: covers, merchandise, serials. The name Trampoline, she says, has no special meaning — she wanted it to feel good in the mouth. The pictures do the rest. Come in. Stay for the soup.