Time, Traces, and RegenerationI once visited an Oya stone quarry to take photographs. Amid the grandeur of nature’s forms, the... Read More
Time, Traces, and Regeneration
I once visited an Oya stone quarry to take photographs. Amid the grandeur of nature’s forms, the marks left by stonemasons as they carved out the Oya stone seemed to compete in their own beauty. The traces of humanity’s enduring endeavor to extract stone remained, and through the passage of time, both those traces and nature’s forms gradually blended into a single entity, weathering away—a scene that was etched into my mind through the viewfinder.
My theme is time and traces. One could say that the flow of nature is the flow of time itself. I capture, through the inorganic and artificial medium of the camera, the fusion and cyclical nature of the pulse of the natural world—which has continued to beat since ancient times—and the traces left by human hands driving wedges into the rock (which, in turn, seem to embody a natural pulse of life distinct from the concept of time invented by humans).
In this series, I arranged within a space plants—a fresh manifestation of life—water carrying the flow, and iron wedges that were artificially shaped and then gradually eroded over time by natural forces. I captured the fleeting moments of their state changes caused by shifting temperatures with a camera and printed the images onto Japanese paper, a symbol of human endeavor.
Through this, I sought to express the inherent incompatibility between human activity and the uncontrollable laws of nature, while simultaneously portraying the human struggle to resist the passage of time.
