Reincarnation of a Shrine (2023)
Nakanojo Biennale, Japan
artist statement below
This visual work is an offering to the animate forces, the elements, the unseen and the primordial.
The space that was selected for my artwork is an old Shugendo Shrine called Goma-do in a small traditional silkworm farming town, Akaiwa in Gunma Prefecture. Shugendo is a syncretic cosmology that merges shamanic animist practices, Tantric and Shinto Buddhism. The Shrine had not been opened in over 40 years; the altar still as it was, though under 40 years of dust.
Altar to the Animate Forces was an installation on old wooden crates and boxes containing Buddhist texts. On them I displayed antique natural history pop-up illustrations of animals (Bee, Frog, Rat, Butterfly, Clam, Snail) that were splayed open using pins and red thread, and found-object effigies called Anthropomorphs. These sculptural assemblages inhabit the edge of the light and are guardians of the thresholds between the living and ancestral realms.
Reincarnation of a Shrine included Syncretica, a collage series in antique slide frames, Ancestors-Descendants, an installation of children’s shoes, silkworm chrysalides and rice combined with laser cut text book covers and a vertical installation of wooden print blocks of Buddhist prayers.
Shrine to the Mother was an altar of vessels, pressed flowers, and offerings.
4 large fine art archival print of mixed-media drawings from my Wisdom Engine series were exhibited on the walls. Wisdom Engines are vector map drawings of perception, boundlessness, and prana/life force that explore the awareness of awareness. They are at once a download and an upload. The maps explore the elasticity of time and space, the relationship between frequency and image/pattern and the synesthetic correspondence between sound, form, and colour. The spiritual drawings integrate study of myth, mathematics and ancient sacred texts, an interest in alchemy and ecology, and a devotional practice. They reflect the observation of my own mind and my relationship with the animate, the unseen and the elemental.
Concentric Story 2: Kuni
Today was a busy one at the Shrine, many visitors.
The buck toothed old man who always talks to me of paintbrushes, came by with blueberries for me.
And the caretaker-san brought his wife today to see the work. She filled my pocket with candies. I told her one of my effigies was dressed as a forest, which seemed to delight. We google translated about flowers and gardens and mothers. When we couldn’t understand one another’s language, we touched our hearts and pointed to each other, saying ‘human’.
Also, an old woman from the silkworm house came by with 5 snow white silkworm cocoons. She motioned to rub them on my face. Maybe they bestow youthful radiance?
And an emerald pheasant with a fire red head marched by.
I am reminded of a movie I saw once, called The Unknown Saint, Moroccan, I think. A thief returns to the fake grave where he buried his loot, to discover it has become a shrine for an unknown saint. Of course, many human happenings ensue.
Two old timers came by to take care of the flowers around the Shrine. The man was bent over like a reed, like a shepherd staff. I have seen him around the village, carefully and meticulously weeding the flowers. I gave him some blueberries in his soil stained and crooked hands. They seemed to be a bridge, the blueberries, because he came over to the Shrine. When he looked at my artwork and then at me, his eyes jumped into mine. It felt for a moment, like the boundaries that kept us in individual form became porous.
I couldn’t quite tell where I ended, and he began.
Blueberries can do this, I suppose.