Measuring the time

In the excavational investigation, the place where relics are buried is analyzed, the ground is dug up with appropriate tools, and when relics are found, they are excavated carefully. When they are dug up, their sizes and constitutive substances will be measured and analyzed. Furthermore, the environment at the time will be studied from the surrounding situation, etc.
Nohara’s work to extract forms from the surroundings and transforming them into artworks seems to be similar to the work of excavation investigator who finds the traces of ancient lives from under the soil, which looks like nothing to the untrained eye, to present them in a visible way. “Shape” that Nohara shows us is based on the motif that she finds from the ordinary scenery in the daily surroundings.
In the first ten days during this program, Nohara traveled along the coasts in Aomori Prefecture and collected various stones. After that, using these stones as a motif, she prepared the base for the painting while incorporating collaborative production. A large-scale mural “Stone Portrait—Buried Images 02” was made of about 220 panels including 24 panels made with 21 participants plus those of Nohara’s production. In parallel with this production, sculptural work “Black Solids—from Measured Drawings” and “Drawing—measurement 01~07” were produced, and they were all presented in her solo exhibition “Buried Images, Recomposed Scenery.”
The foundation of the work “Stone Portrait—Buried Images 02” is made with layered paints. The color of the surface is seemingly plane brown, but many other colors are painted underneath. It also applies to the collaborative production. Each participant chose one stone and worked on the foundation of painting imitating the stone’s texture and patterns. What Nohara often said during the collaborative work is that she wanted them to imagine what lay beneath the surface colors and patterns of the stones chosen as motifs—in other words, what colors are layered before the surface is made up. Here she compares laminations of paints to laminations of time that one stone has gone through.
It seems natural for Nohara to think that something, as it exists, envelopes the duration of time that it has passed. In this work, to begin with, a lot of time was used even before it was painted on the panel. At the first stage, drawings were produced in her sketchbook that she carries every day. This time, based on those drawings, the object was created in Styrofoam. It turned out to be the sculptural work “Black Solids—from Measured Drawings”, and as it was further observed from different angles, the form seen from the angle that she liked became the black pattern painted in the center of each panel in this work. The shape that Nohara herself drew in the sketchbook is observed many times by the artist who created it, became three-dimensional and returns back to be two-dimensional.
Going further into the gallery, the viewer will find “Black Solids—from Measured Drawings” next to “Stone Portrait—Buried Images 02” as if going back to the past. This group of sculptural works looks like being made naturally and artificially at the same time, and they generate a peaceful atmosphere like simple wooden Buddhist statues due to their organic shapes and appropriate sizes to play with one’s hands. The black-painted surface, however, makes the shapes stand out, and they softly ward off human views trying to liken the shapes to something. They rise in revolt against human habits that have been passed down from ancient times to name wooden pieces, mountain shades, stone upheavals, etc., to give them meanings, and interpret the shapes by some relationships. They try to direct us to merely see shapes as they are. Getting loaded with two-dimensional shades behind them by the direct lighting from the side, the works hint at the forms going back and forth between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional.
Drawings are made on paper with the uneven surface like the stone texture in “Drawing—measurement 01~07” placed at the end of the walking line of the exhibit, and the inside of them are filled with thin delicate lines. Each line of them reminds us of the overlap of time like the second hand moving every second.
The passage of time like this and changes in media can be associated with the world heritage Qutub Minar, which inspired her to make production this time. It is an Islamic architecture making use of stone materials from the Hindu temple, and it is said that you can see the stones carved with Hindu patterns here and there. The stones engraved with icons such as humans and animals which are taboos in Islam retain the beauty of engraved shapes, and they simply exist while changing only the meanings depending on the change of the building materials from Hindu to Islam. Such conversion in Qutub Minar resonates with the transformation that Nohara tries from drawing to sculpture, further on to painting to abstract shapes and nullify the meaning.
Nohara’s words that she murmured during the production work left a deep impact: “Stone is filled with colors.” Certainly, when a piece of stone is broken, we see some colors inside. A stone is not a hollow bag, and it has gone through time beyond human scale before it turned out to be the present form. It could be a piece of magma that erupted from deep under the ground or it might be a meteorite falling from the sky. There is a huge amount of time before a stone in front of us has been made, and it can be said that the stone is filled with time that it has gone through. Nohara is the only artist who stayed from the first day of the program to the last day. It is not merely because she had a lot of work to do, but, more than that, she probably needed a certain amount of time in order to accept the time experienced by the “form” in front of her.
She measures time experienced by all nature in the universe and presents them. Nohara, who made measurement as the important starting point for the production, has found a new object to measure.