Incomplete lines in the air

ITO Satoko

MORI Keita’s drawings made in accordance with the condition of the architectural space and the site made an unrestricted expansion in this program ranging from a drawing series on paper with eye-catching delicate figures to the wall drawing that was freely developed toward the back wall along the arc-shaped gallery. On a sheet of paper with a limited space, the drawing is eventually completed, but for the wall drawing, how far space will be used remains undecided and it continues to grow in a progressive form. The material he uses is light being able to cover the wall at a relatively fast speed, and the drawn lines sometimes approach the space away from the support, so that the viewer can experience a feeling of going into the drawing that expands without an end. Represented in the space is a systematic huge structure, and approaching to look at it, the viewer will find that the material is thread of our daily necessities.

Mori’s drawings are made with thread. The nuances felt in “drawing”, such as speed, strength and softness are not in thread, and there are only two ways for the lines between points; tightening or loosening, and straight or curved. As for curves, gravity, natural uncontrollable power, affects them, and there are countless types of lines, depending on how much they are loosened. He makes it a rule to paste thread in such conditions using a glue gun, and improvises his drawing.
Lines drawn with threads different in color and thickness do not necessarily form a surface with connected dots, and threads are left as they are, though they make us expect to see the finished shape. Tangled threads and traces of glue caused by the manual work are important elements of the work. The title “bug report” is a message that appears on a computer screen to inform you of program errors or defects. The tangled threads and traces left on the huge structure-like drawing are compared to a system error on a computer. In any highly controlled system, it can hardly be said that there is no possibility of an error. There are questions for the convenience given and guarantee of security in the seemingly complete world, and what made Mori realize such questions was the great earthquake in Fukushima in his faraway motherland when he was studying in Paris, which he witnessed as information. The collapse of public order that had been assured until then made the artist accept the chaos hidden in this world. It led him to express in his thread drawing series that there was something complex and moving disorderly in the world that seemed to be in order.
The unexpectedness that thread, whose primary use of sewing has been totally altered by a simple act of pasting to form a large structure, strengthens the presence of errors involved in the system and draws people’s attention by slowly bringing up social aspects.
Although the work is drawn extemporaneously by pasting and considered to differ completely from a world constructed on strict calculation, the drawing reminds the viewer of many different things such as a system structure, building design drawing and the unknown universe. These things include information that spreads in our daily lives like bubbles and can be compared to a system that grows with information. The difference between thread and paint or pencil that we usually use for drawing as material is that thread already exists as a style of work, and at the same time, it plays the role of a material to depict new figures. Thread hanging down or tangled off the wall sometimes shows its original form apart from being a line of the drawn figures. The thin and relatively weak nature of the material itself, along with the intricately combined figure images, represents the delicacy and transience of the structure, which causes erroneous operation even with one mistake. While thread can form shapes on the wall in this method of drawing, it suggests a multilayered relationship between its own existence and those figures.
What this material tells us, on the other hand, is a history of the thread that has been indispensable to the development of culture, including the example that became the name of a former trade route, and human creativity. Even though its shape does not change greatly, the thread sews up objects and has formed new shapes at a place familiar to people. In the expression of Mori’s drawings, the thread is a material almost symbolizing the origin of civilization while revealing the structure of society. From the root to the present——the thread’s great leap between two poles would be the reason for creating diverse imagination.
The linkage of contents and media included in the structure of Mori’s work is firm, and extends new discoveries and imaginations by mutually bringing out and multiplying their meanings. The universality is communicated to us today by tracing threads, and something that makes the world is abstractly expressed. Human imagination born there is unlimited.