Aluku was presented by Art Gene in partnership with art@LIFE, Tokyo

"My work probes the 'footprints of time' within everyday life. Things which happen or exist in the places where I walk, the people I meet, the echoes of my senses - I wish to make my works using many different coloured threads, tracing the lines of my memories."

ALUKU (walking) began in 1998 at the Kyoto Junior College of Art and Design when Akiyama, who was a student at the time, attached a "Human Manpokei" (Human Walk Recorder) to her body - a piece of paper and thread that recorded the rhythm of a walk she made of six rounds of the college grounds.

Since then Akiyama has traced her "footprints in time" in Sagamiono, Kyoto, Stockholm, New York, Monflanquin, in the Gascogne region of south west France, Geneva and now, in Barrow-in-Furness.

Her finished works, a record of her day-to-day movements stitched in various coloured threads on paper maps, document how she establishes a life for herself in new places, both in Japan and abroad.

Akiyama's work, writes Mika Kuraya, curator of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, "maintains the feeling and pace of a solitary human being walking as well as the rhythm of a human hand tracing the path with a needle at a similar leisurely pace."

ALUKU. My domestic walking model (Barrow-in-Furness) was supported by: