廣瀬忠司
Time, Traces and Regeneration
I once visited an Oya stone quarry to take photographs. Amidst the grandeur of nature’s forms, the marks left by stonemasons as they hewed the Oya stone seemed to vie with one another in beauty. The traces of humanity’s enduring labour in quarrying the stone remained, and through the passage of time, both these 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 might say that the flow of nature is the flow of time itself. I seek to 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 time immemorial—and the traces left by human hands driving wedges into the rock (which, too, seem to represent a natural pulsation of life distinct from the concept of time invented by humans).
In this series, I have arranged within a space plants—a manifestation of vibrant life—water carrying the flow, and iron wedges that were artificially moulded and then gradually eroded over time by the forces of nature. I captured the moments of change in their states caused by shifts in temperature with my camera, and printed the images onto washi paper as a symbol of human activity.
Through this, I have expressed the inherent inseparability of human activity and the uncontrollable laws of nature, whilst simultaneously portraying the human endeavour to resist the passage of time.
