Daphne Umico Niwa

DAPHNE, by Umico Niwa, is a print publication dedicated to the Japanese-born artist’s ongoing Daphne Adorned Series. Niwa’s Daphnes are nymph-like pewter beings cast from branches and crowned with foraged offerings: seeds, rosebuds, kumquats, dried petals, carrot slices. The book looks at the Daphne as both a sculpture and an image: a figure drawn from myth, a creature of domestic space, and a body in constant transformation.

The publication gathers photographs of the Daphnes in the places where they live. They sit on windowsills, crawl up walls, gather under staircases and rest on tabletops beside lacquer boxes, carved animals and pressed flowers. Works from the series have been shown at Someday in New York, XYZ Collective and fig. in Tokyo, Baleno International in Rome, and Asia Society Texas in Houston, with titles such as Bounty, Village Drunk, Leap, Dazed and Pie Smasher.

Through sculpture, still life and image-based contributions, the book treats the Daphne as a model of personhood outside Western constructs of gender and the body. Niwa speaks of her works as her children, and here memory, ritual and chance are her materials. Photography works as both documentation and a stage, where each Daphne is caught mid-metamorphosis, like a flower wilting or a fruit ripening.

/ publisher June Editions
/ author Umico Niwa
/ editor June Yu
/ publication 2026
/ softcover
/ 158 pages
/ 16 × 22 cm

[ to the bookshop ]