Nobuko Tsuchiya - In Conversation
London-Based Japanese Artist Discusses Her Work And Practice
Jul 22, 2008
Continued
Paul Black: There is a sensation of elasticities and tensions between the delicacies of substances and forms in your work, where elements often remind one of skin juxtaposed with detritus seemingly medical, mechanical, and domestic. These seem ongoing references to the human form, whether skeletal, as in the use of frames to demarcate an internal structure, or even lung-like bellows as in the piece Quietly Now, is this a discussion of the poetry of (human) form?
Nobuko Tsuchiya: They are diagrammatic, emotional maps. It’s like dissecting my own emotions and laying them out, like concepts of poetry. There appears to be a British obsession with logical narratives, whether written or in art. The material can come from anywhere, it’s an intuitive choice not a logical one. It comes down to the true nature of what sculpture should be about, going through the experiment and finding the relationships between things, the balance.
PB: There appears to be a sign of this balance – between the intuitive and the "designed" in your work – that seems to result in a kind of poetic apparatus. When thinking of works like Table Rabbit, would you say there is a psychological narrative to follow, even if not logical, through demarcated surfaces that the viewer may ‘traverse’?
NT: Table Rabbit came from a memory of being young, of being small, of retracing feelings, other works also came from memory or relics from my past, I had a schoolbook and on the cover was Nike the Olympian God and inside lots of diagrams of nature and from that association came the work Nike Of Samothrace. All the works follow on from excerpts of my life, poetic relationships from my memory.
PB: There is a progression between Table Rabbit and Insect Surgery Machine. The latter was the piece that highlighted aspects of the microcosmic in your work, the first real dialectic that drew the viewer to project themselves into the piece in a similar vein to that of installation. This is achieved with a true sense of creating a ‘universe’ for your process, instead of individual "bodies"?
NT: Insect Surgery Machine followed on from Table Rabbit. I wanted to take the work in a different direction, to go somewhere else, so this is a surgery machine of course, so you sleep here, on the ‘bed’ and the idea is that you shrink. You then physically follow the narrative of the works surface, like Alice in Wonderland. The machine has a cycle, it’s cyclical, and you become an insect.
