Daphne

In the book Daphne, the artist, Umico Niwa, recounts personal stories, such as the time she made a pilgrimage to the burial site of her testicles in the mountains of Miyoshi, to having an acid trip on the campus of John Hopkins University, both experiences resulting in an enmeshment of part of her identity with trees. Just before the pandemic struck, in an antique store, she had stumbled upon a pair of pewter cast figurines of a boy leaning in to kiss a girl. It reminded her of the story of how, in order for Daphne to escape the pursuit of Apollo, she called out to her father for help and subsequently was turned into a laurel tree. Overcome with the desire to melt them down and blend them together in her makeshift foundry in the kitchen of her apartment, the pewter was subsequently poured into a mold of a branch, and this is how the series of small anthropomorphic beings, dubbed Daphnes, were born.