A single act of breathing
Created during a residency at Satoko Ueno’s Uchiyama washi papermaking studio, the work was part of Branching Out, an exhibition at the Shiga Kogen Roman Museum with Manami Ishimura, highlighting Kijimadaira Village’s 200-year plan to restore a beech forest on former cattle ranch land. This small rural community is united by a vision to replant what once thrived. A Single Act of Breathing mirrors that fragility and care, serving as a meditation on our mutual reliance and a call to continue stewarding nature for future generations.
Using kozo grown in Satoko Ueno’s fields in Kijimadaira, the fiber was harvested, processed, and snow-bleached the season before the residency. During my time in residence, it was cooked, cleaned, and beaten into pulp with a Hollander beater. I formed sheets in the Western style, embedding wire between two wet sheets of pulp. These were partially dried with a vacuum and then adhered to a steel water dryer.
Once the paper was made, I sculpted it into columns, creasing and bending the sheets to evoke the texture and movement of an esophagus. The arteries were created by shaping wire and dipping it through kozo pulp suspended in water. After drying, the tips were coated with glue and iron, then encouraged to rust with a special “rust juice”. The column sheets were dragged through the residue of that rusting process to produce a bark-like surface, emphasizing the shared presence of iron in both human blood and the earth. The final work was assembled and installed on site at the museum using wire and magnets.