WORKS

In the summer of 2015, I stayed as an artist-in-residence at the Nordland Cultural Center in Bodø, northern Norway. In Japan, I had continued my work by tracing old roads, mountain worship, and customs and history rooted in the land, but this was my first experience of confronting the climate and natural worldview of a foreign country. My motivation for this stay was to see how my everyday perceptions would change by living and creating in that place for a certain period of time, rather than just traveling.

Although I tried to gather information beforehand, I couldn't quite grasp a concrete image of the town of Bodø, and I went there with almost no prior knowledge. In retrospect, I think that uncertainty made my experience there more direct. I arrived during the end of the midnight sun, and the sky didn't get completely dark even late at night. The blurring of time disrupted my daily rhythm, but it also allowed me to extend the time I spent contemplating the landscape.

During my stay, I conducted interviews by bicycle and on foot, traveling as much as 50km on busy days. The coastline surrounded by fjords, the forest paths, the abandoned fishermen's huts and pastures—each scene felt like something out of a movie. However, for the locals, these were just ordinary everyday occurrences, and I was often bewildered by this difference in perspective. The way I had come to perceive landscapes as "special" in Japan didn't apply here. I think that this discrepancy was the starting point for understanding this land.

Between interviews, I dried and sifted the collected soil, and then created drawings based on photographic materials. In the low-humidity environment, the soil dried surprisingly quickly and exhibited a different texture than in Japan. This difference was not simply due to the material itself, but rather manifested on the canvas as the accumulation of time and environment that the land had endured.

Towards the end of production, there was an unexpected event where the production space had to be moved to a conference room due to studio circumstances, but this too was accepted as part of the residency. As I continued to create while surrendering to the changes in environment, I became strongly aware that the relationship between nature and people continues to live on in a different form than in Japan.

More than simply depicting foreign landscapes, this residency was an experience of re-examining the contours of my own "everyday life" from an external perspective. By experiencing the daily life nurtured in a place with a different climate and language from Japan, I think it was also a time to reaffirm where the foundation of my own creative work lies. The perspectives I gained here have quietly but surely continued to influence my work since returning to Japan.