Undeveloped Memory

Kimio Tsuchiya

2nd May - 22nd June 2003

Kimio Tsuchiya is one of Japan's most eminent and active artists, he has built an international reputation for a body of work employing a diversity of forms from used building material and consumer goods to natural objects like driftwood and stones. The use of these materials invests his work with feelings of loss, remembrance and rebirth, their presence a constant reminder of a previous existence.

These themes are most evident in 'Undeveloped Memory' where a cylindrical room of steel plate is surrounded by building rubble and filled with 300 clocks. Their constant ticking intensifies the reborn purpose given to these objects that have already measured out so many lives.

Much of this work has it's roots in the 'bubble economy' experienced by Japan from the late eighties to the mid nineties, old houses and ways of living were destroyed and replaced by modern buildings. Tsuchiya retrieved the debris of former lives incorporating them in new sculptural works, later he burnt these materials and worked directly with ash.

In 'Roses of ashes', books, clothes and other discarded or lost objects were burnt, sculpted and reborn as flowers. Their first purpose served, they do not return to the soil, they are remade giving light to a dialogue between our environment and us, that questions our material civilisation and leaves a pertinent and timely marker to people made insignificant in the wake of economic ambition.

Tsuchiya has completed several major public and private commissions, including an open-air sculpture project at Grizedale Forest Museum in Cumbria in 1991 and an exhibition at Spiral garden in Tokyo in 1992.

In 1990 Tsuchiya was the recipient of the Asakura Prize - Japan's top award for sculptors, he has also featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Japan, the UK and USA since the mid 1970s.

The four works chosen for this exhibition are: Undeveloped Memory, Rose of Ashes, Rose of Glasses and Rose of Grass.

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