Let’s start with a question connected to our current theme, “Full of Desire”. What do you desire for yourself as an artist, and what would be your ultimate achievement?
I would like to put the smell of Love on clean pillows,
And then say nothing more
And wait for the dawn.
Afterwards, I will open this cupboard to empty it and let the time breathe.
Outside the river flows like an endless stream.
Tomorrow, numb with cold, I will let myself be lulled
Like a suspended dream.
Your artwork carries mystical energy and sensual depth. Do you have an endless source of inspiration?
It’s raining lost flowers
Tired days, scars of memories
Night buckets
Spilled on windows
And later when the beauty wakes up
I’ll be around to tell her
That spring is not far
And we all need
To be kissed when we sleep.
In your work, we find interesting materials used – these include wood, animal horns, leather, silver, human hair and so on. Is there any hidden meaning behind the materials?
There is the experience then the emotion
The door open I breathed better
It’s hard for me to drive like this
Three days of searching, digging
To find what I had buried
Few years ago
I didn’t know where it was
Too much has happened since.
I tried for a long time to understand
Eyes gazing into space
Searching for a horizon
Who can give its opinion.
Don’t cry,
There will always be a good reason to defend.
Further down the road
There were signs
And directions
But nothing interesting
Just routine signs.
The trunk open
I looked at my harvests
Not enough stuff
To start growing.
Be light and you’ll catch the birds
It’s always better than a cold.
No more petrol at the station
I will surely finish walking.
I want to talk a bit about the process of making the Vegetal Obscenities shoe-objects. I always thought traditional Japanese lacquer was a meditative and long-period rhythmical ritual. What does it mean for you? Can you tell us about the making process?
It’s a story of rhythm and dancing with time and seasons. Urushi is a sap, a kind of vegetable blood, and you have this feeling of sharing something that is alive, a kind of fluid that arises in a very peculiar way. A caress that you apply to objects that are waiting for this sap to coat their epiderm, a kind of vegetal skin that comes to dress these “Obscenities”. Layer after layer the color stratifies and intensifies, it takes time, a time that registers to reveal infinite depths.
Each layer tells me if the light of the color will soon appear. Memory-material where the gesture matches the object and so in a soft half-light, when the time comes, I will be able to see the desire enlighten my dreams.
