It's always a treat to hear from my friend Kate in Japan. Here are some excerpts from a recently email from Kate.
.....Everywhere we went people were amazed and enthusiastic at how far he has moved on from the image of the Grizedale Sculpture Park most people know. And his talk at the local Ishigami no Oka Museum was a great success. Adam is interested in bringing British artists over for several live/temporary art projects in Japan. To get a taste of projects Adam has worked on so far go to:
http://www.grizedale.org/database/view.php?id=89 ...has moved up to Junior High School. But they both still find time off from more grown up school schedules and playing to be very tough critics for play sculpture proposals I am working on. 17th - 28th June I will be having a two woman exhibition in Sendai Mediateque with the painter Song Sook Nam, Professor of Art and Culture of Design Department of Gwangju University in South Korea. The opening reception will be on 18th June - I will send an invitation to that nearer the time, so do please put that date in your diary if you will be in Sendai.
...Then in July I have been invited to Syria to make work for a new sculpture park there. I will make a play sculpture inspired by 2 dimensional Celtic key patterns that I have known since my childhood in Scotland, and similar to designs found in almost every culture. People will be able to go inside the sculpture, interlinked elements carved from one block of stone. Highlighting different perspectives of the immediate landscape and context to contemplate common links in relationships between different cultures, and the balance of tension and harmony.Katagiri and I met the organisers of the Syrian project while we were working in Lebanon in 2002. That was a fascinating experience - to see my article on that go to:
http://www.ukishima.net/files/essay/essay.e/essay.eJT_Leb.html Meanwhile Katagiri and I are both busy working on new sculpture for exhibitions and commissions, and organising the “Kohkaido Art Show” - installation works by 9 artists and several Morioka based architects 12th - 20th August in an interesting old community hall building in Morioka which we all campaigned to save from demolition. All the participants have come up with very interesting and atypical proposals to suit the space and context, so it should be an exciting experiment. More on that later.
In the meantime there is a very interesting exhibition on at the Iwate Museum of Art showing Horst Antes work in the context of his collection of Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, to see the review I wrote on that as published in the Japan Times (Tokyo yesterday and north Japan today) please go to
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/makeprfy.pl5?fa20050511a1.htm For images of work by Kate Thomson & Hironori Katagiri please visit Ukishima Sculpture Studio home page:
http://www.ukishima.netClick on the "English" or "Japanese" icon, then on the Private Works, Public Projects, Recent Exhibitions, International Sculpture Symposia, or Ukishima Diary pages.
