Nagori
Nagori takes its name from the Japanese expression for nostalgia directed at a season just passed: a melancholy that holds within it the warmth of what was lived, and the quiet knowledge that it will return.
The series emerged from two years Obegi spent in Kyoto, where the density of urban life and the isolation of its figures produced a dissonance she found difficult to leave behind. Relocating to London in 2020, she encountered that tension amplified: a citywide lockdown that stilled the social landscape entirely. These large-scale paintings attend to that stillness, drawing on the visual language of Japanese woodblock prints and American New Realism to trace the dissipating textures of human connection.
