Suzumi Noda was born on 9th May 1951 in Osaka, Japan where she has always been living. She is very active around Japan and internationally with exhibitions, teaching, residencies, and research.
From 1972 to 1974, Suzumi studied Interior Design at Osaka Designers’ College. In 1972 she also studied weaving at Kawashima Textile School in northern Kyoto City. For the thirty years following her graduation, she focussed her teachings on Design and Colour Schemes. She then transitioned into specialising in textile arts, including wearable art and sculptural installations.
In 1985 Suzumi was awarded the winning prize in the Asahi Contemporary Craft Competition for an artwork made of felted wool. This led her to be supported for my first solo exhibition, which was held at Gallery Maronie in Kyoto. To the present day, she has exhibited once every year on average in Japan, and has been shown internationally as far afield as Canada, Australia, Belgium, Poland, Korea, Bulgaria, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, and England.
Since the late 1990s, she has been working with a fusion of luxury and recycled materials, including discarded items from textile production centres like garment and product labels, plastic yarn, fabric samples and offcuts, and loom parts. Through juxtapositions of various materials and subject matter, her artwork creates poignant social commentary on issues such as health, consumerism, and ecology.
In 1998, Suzumi started working with digitally printed fabrics; her first series of works with this innovative medium was a combination of wearable art and installation pieces, including chairs, stools, knitted garments, and jewellery.
Additionally, since 2009, she has been using materials such as lacquer-coated thread, flat foil thread, and repurposed silk obi sashes from Nishijin Textile area in central Kyoto city, which is world-renowned as a traditional textile production centre.
In 2015, a gallery owner in Stockholm gifted Suzumi with some bright yellow sandpaper which ultimately inspired her to create the Sand Fabric Series. From 2017, she began this new body of installation works. She developed a fabric which is covered with coloured sand to produce a sandpaper-like surface, some of which is also patterned with holes to reference jacquard loom punchcard designs. Using this new material, called Sand Fabric, she sculpted garments and other art objects as a means of expression.
From 2006 to 2017, Suzumi was one of the Directors of Kawashima Textile School. For six of those years, from 2012 to 2017, she also worked as a Specialist Professor at Kyoto University of Art & Design (Kyoto Zokei Geijyutsu Daigaku). Since 2018, she has held the position of Specialist Professor at Kyoto City University of Arts (Kyoto Shiritsu Geijyutsu Daigaku) as well as working as an Advisor at Kawashima Textile School.