Our cover artist for this issue is the artist Mari Katayama. Titled Bystander (2016) it is taken from a series inspired by Naoshima Onna Bunraku, a traditional puppet theatre practice that is performed exclusively by women from the Naoshima region.

For these works, Katayama photographed the hands of members of the all-female traditional puppet theatre group, printing them onto material and crafting them into a many-handed doll. Against the backdrop of a natural landscape the vastness of the sea, Katayama alludes to the mythological beauty of Venus, or Aphrodite and appears herself to be born of the sea. The tentacle-like arms and hands that have become her own limbs, repairing the fragmented image of her body, one rebuilt by borrowing those of various others.