The Art Of Nobuko Tsuchiya
London-Based Japanese Artist Discusses Her Work And Practice
Continued
PB: Although there doesn’t appear to be any chemical or kinetic aspects to the work, like the alchemical nature of works by artists such as Beuys, or the kinetic installations of Horn. There certainly seems an allusion to these energies. Many of the materials not only relate in terms of substance but there is almost a sense of "temperature" in the works, that there may be quieter elements occurring in your considerations such a smell, returning us to the most intricate discourse in your work?
NT: There are elements that I pick out which cause me to feel something. I don’t always recognise what kind of feeling the individual elements possess until they begin to relate. It’s important to play with the materials until I reach an intuitive response to them. When I play with an idea I put forms together and then I separate them, and try many permutations, its right when I feel it with my body, not only my conscious self, something deeper than purely emotional. To begin with you use your mind, to think about the past, about the future, then it almost gets down to instinct.
PB: With this sense of the "diagrammatic" – how the object "functions" – even if its functionality is a fiction, or at least an allusion to the poetic. I have described some of the works as "splayed out nervous systems" I did so because of this seeming degree of the diagrammatic, as if you are appearing to open up the processes of something complex and mysterious, would you agree with this perspective on your assemblages?
NT: I like "splayed out nervous systems". People say the work is mysterious but I don’t understand that, as it’s the relationship between my work and me. My high school in Japan was divided between literature, art, and science. I came from the side of science.
PB: Any material or substance in the real world possesses a "chemistry" and can potentially be "transformed" into an equivalent energy. We see this discussion in varying works in recent art, often as metaphor for the human body, where the use of materials expresses an equivalent energy and this idea is used as concept (as I stated earlier). You appear to use similar juxtapositions, but to create poetic recipes of "genetically" related systems and "abstracted" titles?
NT: It often comes up that they look like a weird animal, but that’s because I don’t have a friend (laughter). My emotional response to the objects and materials is similar though. I really like the title Parking Fish Project, again appropriated from narrative text. It actually does make sense; Parking in Japanese can actually mean "doing something in the park" and of course "stationary". The emotional reason for Fish is that we come from fish, from the oceans, and that the Project makes you a fish. The Parking Fish Project series is like devolution, or a journey back in time, both physically and in terms of memory.
