Untitled (Installation for Beaconsfield)

Takahashi is known primarily for her apparently chaotic room installations. She abandoned painting while still a student at Goldsmith's College and began to work with a range of materials, combining found objects and discarded junk with objects from her own everyday life, such as photographs, faxes, post-it notes and used envelopes. Her preferred method of making work is to live in the space in which she is going to exhibit, collecting and accumulating refuse specific to that site, which she later arranges into subtly structured installations. These works are as much about a personal excavation as a physical one in the space. Her first installation of this kind was held at an advertising agency in Battersea, where she was given licence to inhabit part of the office space for a month. The result was Company Deal 1997 which transformed the waste of an average office into a frenetic collage of objects which spilled over the office walls and furniture. At Beaconsfield, the former Victorian 'Ragged School' in Vauxhall, South London, now an artist-run exhibition space, Takahashi undertook another site-specific work, this time creating a series of grids outlined on the tiered parquet floor. The grids appear as defunct work stations, each tangle of flex, blank television screens and old stereo systems is lit by desk lamps, the discarded equipment a poetic reference to the former function of the building, the brightly shining lights a nod to its present: a forum for artistic exploration and discovery.