Kaori Yamashita

Piling stone

Cairns are everywhere in the world where they should be. Especially in Japan, we often see them at shrines, temples, and sacred sites. They are mainly memorials for those who have died. However, the act of piling stones has been practiced before Buddhism and even outside of religion. The act of piling stones has been practiced since the primordial era thousands of years ago.

On the summer solstice June 21, I went on a night hike with Caroline to Rasuanniemi, an esker peninsula. It was a 40-minute hiking course and  also a historic place with ancient ruins of Stone Age dwellings. I found some relatively new cairns off of the course in a place that had nothing to do with the information board about ruins. It was probably something left by a hiker who came recently. Looking at them, I could easily imagine that humans thousands of years ago would have done the same thing, and I became more and more interested in cairns as a primitive fundamental and unchanging behavior (act).

As I researched about cairns, they were used in rituals to contain the dead, also as a signpost, a marking, a greeting, and a mysterious behavior (act). A cairn has various meanings and motives (and various meanings and motives are hidden).

It is a simple act to pick up, stack, and repeat. Why do people pile up stones? I think about the origin of the act of piling stones and continuing to make my work as if piling stones. It is always next to collapse.

Cairn —  a small pile of stones made, especially on mountains, to mark a place or as a memorial (= an object to make people remember someone or something)       Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.). 2022

The moment I capture an ordinary daily life as an image of the world, the joints supporting daily life begin to wobble; connections between objects start to collapse.

The uncertainties of contemporary societies  gives me an impetus to make art and the traces of my hands suggest a fall and space becomes a material that should be shaken or be deprived of a form. I think that the role of art includes the presentation of such a fall or space distorted by a kind of undulation for viewers.

 

A pulse to pause, the next lunar eclipse

What I am trying to do is almost impossible, like stroking the moon gently.

It was neither hot nor cold, it was just right for walking in an unknown place.

Even the wooden pillars for punishment had to be there in the landscape.

Exquisit

It has been repaired and modified —with an emphasis on preserving the heritage— and is open to the public.

My longing to go there is similar to my desire for production. The front half of my body distinctly peels off, almost resembling a violent feeling towards someone. That feeling has the same pulse as a person living and dying.

Hairs stand on end.

I went to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin. And the back half of my body went astray.

Turning over the asphalt of the same road, again, this year.

Mar. 23 in 2009: I called to mind a kitten that had been run over by a car. It resembled a gnarled white knot. I scooped it up, covering it with a cloth, and buried it in the earth.
From then on I could not stop thinking about it, concerned that the cloth, if chemically impregnated, would preserve the state of that gnarled white knot; or else permit it to slowly decay. Though I did not exhume it, I still think of it. I think that the role of Art is to reveal the disintegration and to see the distorted space of those fluctuations.
＜Text from The 1st Tokorozawa Biennial of Contemporary Art SIDING RAIL ROAD 2009＞

On the road lay a crow, trampled by a car.
The broken crow, a gnarled black knot.
I found similarity between this gnarled black knot and one side of my production.
The aim of my work is upward, toward something, through that knot; and what I produce is the divide between fear and longing for death.

Thus far, I know little about that gnarled black knot.
Whether or not I should unravel it, I know not; neither do I know if it is in fact possible.
All that I can do is continue on in my work, because I feel that the resulting space will distort the world we know.
＜Text from Pre-Exhibition Tokorozawa Biennial of Contemporary Art SIDING RAILROAD 2008＞