I look to the past not for answers, but for a language with which to question the present.

At university, Tamaki studied international politics with a particular focus on French politics and spent part of her studies in France. After graduating, she worked in the financial sector in Japan before working as a French translator and interpreter.

Alongside her professional career, she studied medieval European painting techniques and later learned the traditional techniques of manuscript illumination in France. She has since developed her practice largely independently, through the close study of historical manuscripts, materials, and techniques.

Today, her work draws particularly on the visual language of European manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While respecting their materials and techniques, she does not seek to recreate medieval manuscripts. Instead, she adapts their visual language and craftsmanship to her own practice, using both historical and contemporary materials to make works for the present.

Medieval manuscripts were more than works of art. They were vessels for knowledge, ideas, beliefs, and stories, carrying them across time and from one generation to the next.

Tamaki does not seek to recreate the Middle Ages. Instead, she uses the language of the illuminated manuscript to give form to contemporary questions: How do we live with one another? What do we inherit from the past? What should we question, and what do we choose to pass on to the next generation?

Working from outside the culture that produced these manuscripts, Tamaki approaches medieval Europe with both respect and distance. As a Japanese woman working in the twenty-first century, she deeply values its craftsmanship and knowledge without assuming that the values and hierarchies of its time must be inherited with them.

For Tamaki, tradition is neither something to reject nor something to obey. It is something to study deeply, to question, and to carry forward by choice.

Tamaki’s work ranges from independent and commissioned pieces to collaborations with international brands, including Pierre Hermé Paris and Supreme.

At the center of her current practice is Matrimoine, a long-term project conceived as a contemporary illuminated manuscript. Created leaf by leaf, it is intended to become a single manuscript to be passed on to her daughter and future generations, while the ideas contained in each leaf are also released as prints to circulate beyond the original book.

Matrimoine asks what is worth carrying forward — and what should be left behind.