In 1945, towards the end of World War II, the twelve-year-old Yoko Ono and her younger brother would watch the clouds in the sky over the hills of Nagano prefecture, the rural district to which they had moved after leaving Tokyo.
The move from city to countryside was in many ways an idyllic healing experience, the vast sky serving to expand Ono’s imagination. It was a liberating starting point for an artistic career that has spanned over seven decades.
Today, the artist continues to look to the sky for inspiration. For her, the sky is ‘the most beautiful mysterious thing.’
Yoko Ono - SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) - photography Garrett Carroll
It’s an inspiration that has repeatedly fired her vast body of work. From her second solo show Works of Yoko Ono, in 1962, where some visitors were puzzled by Ono’s ‘non-paintings’ consisting of phrases like ‘Painting to see the skies / Drill two holes on canvas / Hang it where you can see the sky’; through her Touch Piece, held from dusk to dawn at Kyoto’s Nanzenji temple, in which Ono gathered fifty people in the moonlit garden, communing physically and responding to such instructions as ‘Look at the sky’ and ‘Touch each other'; to her belated songwriting credit for John Lennon’s iconic anthem, Imagine: ‘Imagine there’s no heaven … No hell below us Above us only sky’ – the lyric for which derives from short texts in Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit. Initially credited only to Lennon, in later years, Lennon commented that, ‘Imagine could never have been written without [Yoko].
Yoko Ono - SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) - photography Garrett Carroll
For her debut Phaidon Artspace edition Yoko once again looks to the sky. SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) is the first-ever sculptural edition commissioned for Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists Series of monographs, which celebrates its 30th Anniversary this year.
Limited to a variable edition of 32 stamped and numbered poured resin forms, each work features distinctive cloud imagery—no two impressions are exactly alike—and comes with a special anniversary edition of the artist’s CAS monograph with a stamped and numbered bookplate.
First envisioned for an installation in 2011, Ono’s SKY PUDDLES reimagine the everyday puddle as a portal to the sky. Resin “puddles,” like delicate, lustrous liquid spills, spread across the floor, inviting viewers to walk among them and experience ground and sky as one continuous field. Her new SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) edition continues this legacy of experimentation and is the first multiple ever created in the SKY PUDDLE series.
The edition measures 11.25 x 8.125 x .09 inches, consists of cast resin with UV flatbed and silkscreen print, and comes in an edition of 32 with 10 APs priced $2,100.
Yoko Ono -
SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) - photography Garrett Carroll
In some ways SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) proves Ono’s art is as alive now as it was when she wrote her 1971 artist statement, What is the Relationship Between the World and the Artist? (reproduced fully in our Yoko Ono Contemporary Artists Series book).
“Many people believe that in this age, art is dead," the statement reads. "They despise the artists who show in galleries and are caught up in the traditional art world. Artists themselves are beginning to lose their confidence. They don’t know whether they are doing something that still has value in this day and age where the social problems are so vital and critical. I wondered myself about this. Why am I still an artist? And why am I not joining the violent revolutionaries? Then I realized that destruction is not my game."
"Violent revolutionaries’ thinking is very close to establishment-type thinking and ways of solving problems. I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back.”
“Artists can change the world into a Utopia where there is total freedom for everybody. That can be achieved only when there is total communication in the world. Total communication equals peace. That is our aim. That is what artists can do for the world! In order to change the value of things, you’ve got to know about life and the situation of the world. You have to be more than a child."
"That is the difference between a child’s work and an artist’s work. That is the difference between an artist’s work and a murderer’s work. We are artists. Artist is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist. It doesn’t involve having a talent. It involves only having a certain frame of mind, an attitude, determination, and imagination that springs naturally out of the necessity of the situation.”
Buy SKY PUDDLE (2011/2025) here and take a closer look at the Contemporary Artists Series book here.
