An Interview With Nobuko Tsuchiya
London-Based Japanese Artist Discusses Her Work And Practice
Ants are amazing creatures. Hidden in their scale is the most intricate detail that you may have happened upon with a sense of awe. In fact, ants would instantly appropriate Nobuko Tsuchiya’s sculpture as their natural home, like techno environs for the minuscule. As the works often reflect, "An empire as the aggregate of many states under one common head", a quote by Burke, that could relate as much to Tsuchiya’s aggregation of Microcosmic dialogues as it does to a socio-political structure, of humans, or indeed ants.
Nobuko Tsuchiya’s work is sculpture about sculpture, but not in any cold or academic fashion. This is about the base nature of assemblage, where we discover the beauty of minutia and the consideration of the silently elaborate. This is art where each substance, material, and form reeks of personality and creates a "society" of understanding.
We are viewing a sculptural "ants' nest", where if obtuse, we might overlook Tsuchiya’s hidden beauties of quiet and tiny discourses.
Just as the Gods’ once "viewed" the life journey of the Greeks, we are invited to view this fictional and mysterious journey from our own ‘raised’ perspective. The artist forces us to look into her work, and at once project our miniaturised selves into some of the artist’s labyrinths.
Tsuchiya has been described as creating highly wrought agglomerations that are often beguiling. These works are quietly dramatic microcosms of closed experimental systems. The artist posits a series of poetic juxtapositions alluding to hidden processes and otherworldly narratives, with stripped down bodies of sculptural frames that highlight a component. All the works engender an apparatus for the poetic. Tsuchiya’s material usage - whether Soft, gelatinous or fluid, or perfunctory and labyrinthine - become parts of this micro-dialogue denoting an ambiguous and enigmatic world of surprise and stimuli.
Appearing to rely on aspects of the intuitive, Tsuchiya explores the relationship between artist and material and material and material. Part of the conversation also extends to the relationship between material and form - delicate and intricate systems of poetry and tensions. The subversion of at once recognisable elements re-constituted to form a secondary set of connotations.
The artist’s titles often highlight the "abstracted", even surreal narratives of these poetic concordances. Often with a sense of how the materials relate far beyond their surface qualities. As with certain conceptual sculptors use of material to suggest concept, like the recently interviewed Michael Joo, or Joseph Beuys’ use of animal fat and felt in specific forms, Tsuchiya’s use of material and substance is equally as complex and diverse. But instead, the correlation of material operates through a poetry and lyricism. There is often an aspect of installation in this artist’s sculpture, operating with its own "universal" structure, implementing a kind of poetic circuitry. But the artist currently expresses the representation of the kinetic in her substances rather than any kind of Beuysian entropy.
These are universes that are yet to truly function chemically or kinetically, but exist as the topography of an inverted form made "landscape", as with Tsuchiya’s Insect Surgery Machine, a factory-esque journey for the microbial. This art is like the autopsy of a mechanical animal - an eviscerated robot, with its hardware Inverted. Tsuchiya is an autoptor digging through the entrails of some domestic mechanoid.
So it was at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, Tsuchiya’s preferred home, that I sat down with the artist to discuss these splayed out nervous systems and adamantine mechanisms.
