“On Fruition”

In folktales, the yamauba (mountain crone) is portrayed not only as a terrifying supernatural being, but also as one who helps people and brings blessings. I grew up in a mountainous region rich in nature, yet I am also someone who has left that land. While the comfort of rural life has been a source of my work, I rarely confronted its sense of confinement or the difficulty of belonging. Within this context, I came to learn about the yamauba—a woman who deviates from the village, undermines its norms, escapes into the wild without harboring resentment, rejects domination, and lives resiliently and fluidly in the mountains. Embodying the multiplicity of nature and possessing qualities of a goddess, her way of being loosened the spells that bound me and offered a sense of encouragement.

The conception of this work is also connected to Aenokoto, an agricultural ritual of Noto. The act of literally taking the invisible deity by the hand and welcoming them resonates with my own approach to lacquer—seeking to relate to it as an equal, as if addressing a person.
The two panels correspond to past and present, each tied to a different forest space. Drawing from the figures of the yamauba and Aenokoto, layered images of women, spirits, and trees merge within the surfaces, and an unseen presence that mediates the two spaces emerges. The hollow sculptural forms placed alongside the old tools were made by taking molds of actual decaying fruits using the dry-lacquer technique. The falling light and droplets condense into each grain of rice, eventually carried into our bodies and into the fields.

Materials: wooden panel with hemp cloth, urushi (lacquer), metal powder, diatomaceous earth, linen, rice husks, old tools, lacquer tree