About the artwork

The works were installed in a space inside the NO BUTAI Snow-Land Agrarian Culture Center, Matsudai. Their basic themes were agriculture and culture. In the part of the installation that focuses on agriculture, I explored the relationships among agricultural tools, soil, and seeds as an art space, focusing attention on the tools that are indispensable for farming. Relation—Farmer’s Work is a collaborative project with participants using agricultural tools. Farmers provided the tools, long used and stuck away in storage sheds. Then I sealed seeds to the very tools used in planting seeds. These tools had long been part of the lives and relationships of the families who used them. With culture as another major theme of my artwork, I focused on education. Relation—Blackboard Classroom involved participants using the blackboards. My goal was to transform the classroom into an art space. I had imagined how much fun it would be if the whole classroom were made of blackboards. This work is a collaborative work with those who have used, or will use the blackboard in this classroom.