JANET NEUWALDER

“Shikata Ga Nai/It Cannot Be Helped”

Shikata Ga Nai / It Cannot Be Helped

The artist’s mother and relatives were incarcerated at the Topaz WWII Japanese American internment camp, Topaz,  in Delta, Utah from 1942-1945. As a child, she used to look at the pins in her mother’s jewelry box made from shells collected in that harsh desert, which was the site of an ancient seabed. These shells, artifacts from millenia ago, were collected by the internees and turned into handicrafts, known as the art of Gaman (which means persevere).

Shikata gai nai / It cannot be helped was the response by the internees to the injustice of their incarceration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It signifies that one cannot control what happened, but could control the good they made out of it. The Japanese Americans citizens were the face of the enemy, indistinguishable from the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor.

Visiting the site and walking the former streets of the camp, the shells are still plentiful. Each shell is a little beacon, a reminder of the beauty and potential of the smallest thing. They must have been seeds of hope in that barren desert. Created in community, the Gaman pins have a tender beauty and humanity that contrasts with the harshness of their conditions.

In this artwork, each hand-pinched shell represents a person (“resident”) of the camp. 11,000 “residents” were processed through Topaz. This installation includes approximately 4500 shells. To date, the artist has created 10,000.

As the artist pinches each shell, as individuals and when fused together with glaze; they become “families” and “neighborhoods”.  She is encoding her humanity with geologic time, just as the Neolithic potters did as they created vessels encoded with their fingerprints.

Anthropologists confirm the human desire for creation and meaning with what is left behind. The shells remain as contemporary fossils, storytellers and keepers of history.

Janet Ayako Neuwalder

May 2026

BIO

Janet Neuwalder is a sculptor and installation artist specializing in clay and ceramic processes. Some of Neuwalder’s installations are modeled after anthropological displays often found in Natural History Museums. Her wall installations are often assembled from hundreds of fragments that seemingly float on the wall. Neuwalder draws from her Japanese-Austrian heritage using historical, personal, and appropriated images as mental and visual markers that map and launch a visual arena for the viewer.

The Focus On The Masters archive has extensive information about this artist.