GRIDS WITHOUT GROUND: SACHIYO NISHIMURA’S MODULAR ABSTRACTIONS OF LANDSCAPE

Sachiyo Nishimura is a Chilean-born photographic artist living and working in London whose work aims to challenge our perceptions, constructions, and abstractions of the landscape. For the past twenty years, Nishimura has trained himself in photography as a mechanical and conceptual operation, an encounter in which the three-dimensional world is flattened, fragmented, and reduced to codes of perception. 

Photography as Graphical Code

Her method is neither reportorial nor purely formal. Instead, Nishimura considers photography to be a graphic system in which visual information, such as light, depth, or perspective, is processed and flattened into linear languages: edges, tones, and spatial vectors. “My approach to photography is strongly graphical,” she explains. “I understand the photographic medium as a device that graphically abstracts and represents the three-dimensional world into the two-dimensional surface... translated into purely graphical codes: lines, shapes, and tonalities.”  The Line Series conveys this concept, positing the camera not as a recorder of indexical traces, but as a modular device of reconfiguration, where the logic of composition is no less important than what is registered. 

Lines 01-2, 2010, Edition of 10

 Photography, Giclée print, 90 x 105cm

The conceptual rigour of her work makes it a precise response to post-media photography theory, which posits that photographic images are not traces of reality but constructions operating within aesthetic and conceptual systems. In the digital age, photography has shifted from capturing reality to expressing new pictorial structures. For example, Nishimura’s landscapes are rarely set in any specific location. Instead, they unfold a nameless visual grammar of infrastructure, including railways and pavements, grids and tracks, assembled to resemble a memory of a place without ever really being there.

In Nishimura’s modular photographic works, including Lines on Pavement 01–1 (2024), recently exhibited in Swanfall Art’s annual exhibition, Fables, she captures sites that seem at once banal and unplaceable: walls, pavements, curbs, and edges. These are fragments of the everyday that, once stripped of scale and context, lose their geographic specificity and begin to circulate as anonymous visual units, floating vessels of information.

Lines on Pavement 01-1, 2024, Edition of 4

 Photography, Giclée print, 78 x 125cm

Disassembling the Grid

This methodology extends to her Cityscapes module, where larger modular compositions are constructed from grids of individual black-and-white prints. In the Routes 01 series, a sweeping railway track spans two large grids, each divided into smaller grids filled with photographic works. Their rhythm is hypnotic: metal curves echo across frames, slowly bending from order into distortion. These works often feature railway intersections or urban wires that crisscross the sky, evoking musical notations. Small shifts are revealed when examining each piece of photographic work, such as changes in angle, focus, or distance. Totality is just an illusion. The viewer assembles the scene in their mind, bridging minor visual gaps through perceptual stitching. In some arrangements, repeated segments and inversion symmetry reappear across the grid, drawing attention to the constructed, rather than captured, nature of the image.

Routes 01-A, 2001, Dyptich, Edition of 8

Photography, Giclée print, 50 x 140cm

Across works such as Landscape/Fiction 14 and Traces 3, the grid - so often tied to architecture, urban planning, and visual rationalisation - is turned inside out. Instead of disciplining space, it becomes a framework through which spatial perception frays and reforms. Photography here does not mirror reality, but reorganises it.

Landscape/Fiction 14, 2011, Edition of 10

Photography, Giclée print, 55 x 115cm

Trace 3, 2001, Edition of 10

Photography, Giclée print, 67 x 66cm

Nishimura’s practice is a quiet revolt against representational assumptions. By abstracting the everyday into modular systems, she redefines photographic seeing not as depiction but as construction. Her images invite us to reflect not only on what we see, but also on how systems of order and perception shape our vision itself.

Images: © Sachiyo Nishimura, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu