Noriko Okaku is the Japanese artist whose work is central to The Art Station’s special performance of “The Interpreter” at Thorington Theatre at the end of this month. Here, Noriko explains how the visual art will be given new life in the woodland setting
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Noriko Okaku, a Japanese artist based between Kyoto and London. I work across animation, installation and performance, and more recently my practice has become increasingly participatory.
If you had to describe your artistic journey in one paragraph, what would you say?
I originally trained in animation at the Royal College of Art and began my career making stop-frame animations using collage. Over time, I realised that what interested me most was not animation itself, but the way collage works. It brings together things from different contexts and allows something new to emerge between them. That became the foundation of how I think as an artist. Since then, my practice has expanded beyond animation into installation, performance and participatory work, but collage remains at its core. I’m interested in creating situations where new meanings can emerge through unexpected connections between things.
When did you first have the idea for The Interpreter, and what is the thinking behind it?
I created The Interpreter in 2015 during an artist residency in Derbyshire organised by QUAD, Animate Projects and D-Lab around the theme of “Analogue/Digital”. I decided to create a series of collage works as the analogue element of the project, alongside a digital animation constructed from those collages. I travelled across Derbyshire, gathering material and inspiration for the collages from local history, folklore and legends, as well as from my own experiences there.
The collages later developed into a tarot-inspired structure, which I think of as a kind of manual editing machine: by drawing and rearranging the cards, the audience can re-edit the fixed sequence of the animation and create new interpretations and stories from the same images.
How do animation, tarot cards and collage interweave for this?
As I mentioned above, the residency theme was ‘Analogue/Digital’. At the time, I was thinking about analogue and digital through media such as film and digital animation. I was fascinated by the contrast between the physically separated frames of a film strip and the apparent continuity of digital moving images, where images seemed to flow into one another. Looking at film contact sheets, I began thinking about what happens in those gaps, and how our imagination connects one image to the next and constructs a story between them.
I began to recognise a similar structure in other forms, such as the gaps between panels in comics, where separate images are connected through the viewer’s imagination. This eventually led me to tarot. When cards are drawn and placed along a timeline, such as past, present and future, the images may have no obvious relationship to one another, yet the person reading them finds connections between them and constructs a narrative.
I realised that this was also very close to the way collage works: images from completely different contexts are brought together, and something new emerges through their combination.
For The Interpreter, the 22 collages became the material for both the animation and the cards. In the animation, I arranged them into a fixed sequence, creating one possible narrative by using my own imagination to fill the gaps between them. The tarot cards do almost the opposite: each time they are shuffled and drawn, that fixed sequence is opened up again. It is the person reading the cards who finds connections between them and creates a new story.
For me, this is where collage, animation and tarot come together. They all involve making connections between separate elements, and I’m interested in how meaning can emerge in the spaces between them. Meaning is not necessarily fixed within each image but can arise through the way we bring things into relation and interpret them. There is no single correct reading.
How excited are you that the UK premiere of The Interpreter will be at Thorington Theatre next month? How will the woodland setting enhance the performance?
I’m really excited to see The Interpreter take on a new life in this performance. I don’t think of the work as something fixed. As the title suggests, it is open to being read and reinterpreted by others, so seeing other artists take the original work and transform it into something new feels very much in the spirit of the project.
I often use old engravings in my collages. They were originally made for completely different purposes and belonged to different contexts, but over time they became part of archives, where those original contexts can fade. I find them much later, bring them into new relationships, and they become something else again. I like the idea that my own work can continue in a similar way: that a record of something I once made can become material for someone else’s imagination and lead to something I could never have made myself.
I’m also very excited about the woodland setting. I’m currently in Japan and haven’t visited Thorington Theatre yet, and I’ve never experienced a theatre in a setting quite like this. One of the cards in The Interpreter, The Guide, was inspired by a Derbyshire story about a woodcutter who finds a fairy pipe in the forest and is led into the fairy world. The setting at Thorington immediately made me think of that story. I imagine that being surrounded by the woods will add another layer to the performance and help draw the audience further into its imaginary world.
What other projects are you working on?
I still think through collage, although what I consider to be “collage material” has expanded over the years. I mentioned earlier that I often work with old engravings, but more recently I’ve also been treating other forms of information as material, including AI-generated material shaped by audience participation. I’m interested in this ongoing process, where what emerges can become material for something new to emerge.
At the moment, I’m preparing for an exhibition opening at The Art Station on 12 September, where I’m showing a piece I first presented in Japan this April, The Meaning of No Meaning. Rather than simply showing the same work again, I’m treating the earlier version as material in itself and reinterpreting it for a new place and context.
The Interpreter, presented by The Art Station, takes place at Thorington Theatre in Suffolk on Monday August 31, 2026, 8.30-10.15pm. Structured in three parts, The Interpreter blends storytelling, live music and visual art. Featuring artwork by Noriko Okaku, costumes by Yoko Brown, composition by Kier Vine and music by Perhaps Contraption. There are also solo performances by Catherine Ring (marimba), Charlotte Jolly (clarinets), and Jin Theriault (flutes). The evening also includes film by Emily Richardson and baritone Rob Gildon, who leads moments of audience participation. Visit thoringtontheatre.co.uk
Featured image of Noriko Okaku by Yuto Kudo
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