Maiko Kikuchi received her B.A in Theater Arts and Fashion Design from Musashino Art University, Japan in 2008, her M.F.A in Sculpture from Pratt Institute, in 2012. Extensive multi-faceted professional experience in the areas of Illustration, painting, drawing, collages,sculpture,animation and puppetry/performance. She presented her art works in “Crown Heights Film Festival”, group exhibition“In Time/Out of Place” at Parasol Project(NY), “NO PARKING” at Ca’d’ Oro Gallery(NY), “Unwritten stories” at HERE art center(NY), “To See or Not To Be Seen” at Hot Wood Art(NY), Online exhibition” Dear You” at Field Project (NY), “Four and twenty Black Birds” at Jamestown Artcenter(RI), “By Chamber 02” at CITAN (Tokyo), WWW(Tokyo) etc. She has also committed to musicians and bands for creating their music videos. As theatre artist, she presented her self direction object theatre pieces at many theaters in NYC such as The Public theatre, LaMaMa, Japan Society, St. Ann’s Warehouse, HERE Arts, Dixon Place, The Wild Project, FiveMyles Gallery. Making “Visible Daydream” is the coherent purpose for my creation. What, then, is my daydream? I define it as my imagination world that lurks in my ordinary life. The daydream consists of the elements in my daily life so it seems familiar, but also unusual by being twisted up somehow. The first time I created my daydream was at my father’s old office and I was 4 years old. My father is a psycho-analyst and he had a big wooden box filled with sand and tons of miniature figures displayed on a shelf in his office room at that time. That was there for a type of children’s therapy called “Sandplay therapy” a method by which the doctor was able to analyze a child’s unconscious thoughts by the miniature world they created with the toys on the sand landscape inside of the box. Every time I went to his office, I was so into making my little world inside of the box. They are all the elements of this real world but depending on how you place them, the world becomes unusual and that made me imagine all the different stories behind them. When it was time to clean up and we had to go home, the sand world felt like it had been a dream. That experience influenced me not only in my creative process, but also in my daily thoughts. I often imagine what if the elements of my daily life turned into something unreal and at that moment I feel as if I was in the world inside of the sandplay box. If I could extract this feeling of excitement and fright and put that into a bottle, I would label it “Daydreams” and start thinking of how I can share it with others.