How We Hold

Hiromi: In a sense, it’s narrative, and walking up to it and seeing it in person, it’s not just a visual effect, but it kind of triggers all the different senses of my body, whether it’s hearing or smell. It’s very thought provoking through the vessel. I also love that there are so many different ways to work with glass.

Beth: Can I say something about your sculpture? The forest, tell me the title of the installation.

Hiromi: Yes, Sleeping Forest.

Beth: I was thinking about the vessel in that work, even though those pieces are not vessels. But it made me start thinking about the tree as a vessel, and the containment of life in that particular flora, and the way that everything is gently hovering in space, and that those branches are hollow, but it’s like a vessel that’s been literally chopped or truncated or destroyed on some level. That inherent loss in that piece is really interesting to me. It is a literal moment that has passed, although some people might not know it, because I started thinking about how it was made. Because I do that sometimes. Not all the time.

Hiromi: Always, always, yes!

Beth: I thought, oh, this may have started as a vessel. I don’t know if it did, it could have also not started as a vessel, but there’s a poignancy in the loss of what appears to be, that it has been reduced to a shell that alludes to the tree as the vessel.

Hiromi: Thank you. Yeah, it’s interesting. I love to hear that. I never thought of it as a vessel but in a way, we can read it as a vessel form. I love that, how you said it, that it’s sort of a shell. It could have had water in there; it could have had veins in there.

Beth: If you think about the systems of how trees grow, biologically.

Hiromi: Yes, almost like veins or hollow tubes that feed something. I didn’t think about that in my work, but it’s really interesting to hear a good, interesting perspective. I think both of us have this sense of ghosts in our work, in particular yours, with the vessel forms.

The Sleeping Forest, where it started was — I grew up in nature. I grew up in Japan and I grew up at the bottom of the Japanese Alps. The forest is behind a field of rice. I spend a lot of time in nature, and a couple years ago, when I visited and was just going for a walk in the woods, that really sort of refreshed me and brought back all my memories of growing up. And it’s that walking into the woods, the feeling of coldness and moist in the woods in the summertime, all these parts that I experienced and sensed formed into that work, I feel sort of walking in the woods, but instead of all the tree branches on the ground, it’s sort of lifted. In a way it’s sort of creating a frozen time. So that’s where that work came from.

It’s kind of interesting, because I looked at your work, and you have a piece that has trees and a shack with the wooden parts with the guns.

Beth: Oh, yeah, that’s Aspects of (American) Life.

Hiromi: I love how you approach the trees in the work. It’s thin, instead of three-dimensional. You have this fused glass that is attached to the walls, and I thought it was very interesting. It’s like, am I looking at a shadow of the trees? Or is this the trees? And a kind of very interesting conversation that I had with the work.

Beth: Can I ask you about your process? I’m curious about how inspiration comes to you as you’re walking in your home forest. I saw that you’re also responding to specific sites that perhaps you were invited to respond to. And I’m curious about that, how your process unfolds when you are responding specifically to sites, because I do that too in my work, and I find it to be a new experience every time. I cannot predict how the experience is going to unfold, and whether or not I will be inspired by the site that I’m in. [I’m curious how] you prep yourself to have that experience and engage in a site or a space and whether you have any control over that at all.

Hiromi: For me, I tend to pay attention to the site. I look at a space and see what works, whether it’s a gallery space, museum space, art center, any place outdoor, indoor. I look at how the light is perceived, or the history of the rooms. I research that place, and the history of the place, and that kind of helps to form and learn about the site.

At the same time, I have things in my mind that I’m thinking about over the years and it sort of comes together, like when I have an idea, but I didn’t have the right site to exhibit, but now when I see this [other] space, it will be perfect with my work. And so it’s very organic, but yes, site-specificity is important in my work.

Beth: Mine is as well. I prepare by researching the site, the history. It’s the deep mapping where you get all of the anecdotal stories, you get the geological stories, you get the cultural history, you get every aspect of information. But then, this still is not necessarily always going to lead you to a place where you have the inspiration. It does, but it’s like stepping into the unknown over and over again, which I rely on, and I appreciate that, and it spurs my practice.

But I’m fascinated about how other people cultivate that experience and arrive at a proposal or a decision. It’s like trying to herd cats. You can have three inspirations in one week and then nothing for two years. In my studio practice, you trudge through the concepts, and it’s fascinating and interesting, and then you get to a point where you’re waiting for something, and then it comes, but you didn’t think it was going to come from the left, you thought it would come from the right. That is interesting to me, and also that there’s an expectation if you’re invited as an artist, like the work that you did in the Arboretum, that you’re being invited. Did you propose the work to the Arboretum? Or did they say “would you like to do something outside in the Arboretum?,” and then you spent time there and decided what to do?

Hiromi: I visit a site and walk around and see what will work for this place, and sometimes I forage. For the arboretum, I wanted it to be specific to that Arboretum’s outdoors or garden so I forage the leaves, and, I take it that back into the studio, cast it in glass and bring it back to the site or create forms that reflect the surroundings of the arboretum.

It depends on the project site that I get invited to, but I feel like for a lot of my work, I visit my memories. The memory is a big part of it, revisiting traveling and getting inspired by the things that I grew up with, and its difference. I thought it was this, but now it’s different. It deforms over time, and the memory turns into some story that might not have been 100% true. The experience that I think that I experienced is translated into the work.

I also feel glass is a wonderful material to tell stories in that way, because we can talk about the memory through the colorless object. Vessels or glass installation are how I remember my memories. I’m always thinking of something in my head, revisiting memories or experiences, and then the opportunity or place comes and those things come together.

Beth: Also, It’s hard to have a static experience with the material because the light is constantly making the shape change and refract and reflect. And then it is a supercooled liquid, so it is inherently in a fluid state. That metaphor is really powerful for memory.

Hiromi: Yeah, I think so too. I’m curious, Beth, can I ask a question?

Beth: Of course, that’s all I’ve been doing! I hope you don’t mind, I didn’t ask your permission.

Hiromi: The earlier works with the vessel forms, the 16th, 17th century sort of table, filled with all these gorgeous, well-crafted, vessel forms, and it overflows, but at the same time, they’re distorted and they’re crashed. How are your thoughts transformed into that work? I’m curious how that is visualized — how your thoughts are materialized in the material, how it is translated into your work.

Beth: I start with a general premise in the work, a general question or general direction. And then the work basically unfolds in a really formal way, on some level. The compositions start with the largest volume, mass forms, and then those objects tell me what needs to happen in relation to them. So it’s a dialogue, it’s a conversation with the forms and the material. I spend a lot of time studying the composition and waiting to see what needs to happen. If it’s not clear to me right away, then I have to wait, and each installation unfolds on its own timeline. The work is always about time and history, as well as the future — past, present, and future. But the process of making the work very much mimics the content of the work. So I might have a general direction that I think something is going to go, and then it pivots and changes and is disrupted by something that is unexpected. I have a general agenda, and the agenda starts the path, then I have detours, and I have disruptions to the agenda that I’m open to, and I’m looking for. I’m constantly in dialogue with the work until the work is finished. And I know when it’s finished. As we do. I know how people ask, well, how do you know? and I say, because, you know! That’s how you know.

The very first time that something broke while I was installing it was a really important moment in the practice, where I decided to use that moment in a conceptual way and begin to understand happenstance. They’re almost like John Cage moments. You’re just opening the piano and letting all the audience talk and then shutting the piano, it’s just all of those moments become of equal value in the work, whatever that means.

I’m interested in these fusions of unintentional and intentional things, or the idea of intentionality and the idea of this fallacy of control, basically this fallacy that we’re controlling our direction, we understand our own mind. We understand 10% of our brain, that we think we know what’s going on at any given time. I’m really curious about that space of unknown, and I can go in a direction, but my life could change tomorrow, and then my direction will be different. So it’s the balance, right?

Hiromi: I feel like especially working in glass blowing, it’s just so hard to control sometimes, forms happen and sometimes, things are out of my control, and it might be the best thing to happen for the piece. I always want to control — my work doesn’t look so controlled, but I do have this thing where I want to control. But I think it’s really important for artists to let it go or to have the material speak by itself or happen in directions that are out of control.

Beth: I think that’s interesting. I was talking to someone the other day, and they were saying how they know someone that — the space between the idea and the manifestation of the idea — they have such control over their practice that they can realize [it] with no daylight between the idea and the actual finished object. They have the mastery of their practice to that extent. And I thought, why would you make it then? I would find it completely uninteresting to have that much control over everything, I would put myself at a disadvantage in order to put myself in a place of imbalance so that I could discover something more. That’s just the way my brain works though, and that’s also a form of control. We can say that as well.

Jessica Ferrer: I have a question for the two of you. Something someone mentioned and alluded to earlier about working with clear glass and the transparency, specifically, and we’re just curious about why both of you are interested in working with that type of glass — that clarity — what is it that compels you about it?

Hiromi: It’s the diffraction of refractive materials. I love that it can diffract and refract the light — cast the light through the glass. I love to try to tell a story with colorless materials because then it doesn’t give too much of a definition of how things should be looked at, or it kind of gives a ghostly quality, an ethereal quality. It has a weight but it doesn’t look like there is a weight in the work. There’s something about it that I really enjoy, all of that quality.

Beth, too, her work is a hot shop glass blowing to casting. And then each different stage of glass, there’s a time when the materials are fluid; there’s a time when the material gets solid, and there is that condition that I like about it, and then we can also shape it, we can form it. I love that I can work comfortably. If I use clay, I can’t see what’s inside. I can still model, but I can’t see the inside, and it’s something about glass, the fragility of it. You can’t see it, and I love that I can choose from opaque to totally clear, and it works well for me to tell my story that way. How about you, Beth?

Beth: There are several reasons why I don’t work in color. The initial reason that I abandoned color was because I really feel like colorless glass or almost colorless glass — because as we know, even the colorless glass has some tinges and shades of color, which become heightened when everything is clear. I think that the clear glass really captures the essence of an object or the idea of an object. My work is representational and narrative, and believe it or not, I consider myself somewhat of a minimalist. I reduced the color out of the material because it was not necessary. People already in their neurological interpretation are seeing green ferns and metal chalices and a candle that has just been burned out, just like when you’re reading a book, and you fill in all of the details of the space. I feel that colorless glass invites you in to have your own personal ownership over the narrative of the work. At the same time, I think it is essentially an optically-frustrating experience. Because when you have something that’s transparent, especially, you’re looking through it as you move and the light changes, what you think you see is actually not what you’re seeing. There’s a lot of optical illusion.

When I first started working in still life, I was really interested in the economic and consumerist late-stage-capitalist experience of the still life in relation to the Dutch Golden Era. It became really important for me to give the viewer something that they fundamentally could never own. You could buy it — that’s a whole other part of making art in a capitalist society — but you can’t ever fully, visually own it. It’s a constant frustration. And that, to me, really parallels this buying culture and this idea of constant growth and constant consuming, and how the moment after you’ve shopped, you are somewhat gratified, and then you’re hungry to consume again. And it’s this endless pit. So initially, the colorless clear glass really worked well for that frustration of — it’s here. It’s also beautiful, and it’s precious, it’s fragile, but it’s not really available to you, even though it’s tangible and right in front of you. Now, because I’m much more focused on mortality and the transitional and the temporal, the colorless glass just begs engagement of the ephemerality of life.

This is a historically decorative material, and so in introducing color into the material and possibly representational color, there is a danger there of it becoming just too ornamental, and just stopping the conversation. So, all of that, and I love the decorative arts. A lot of my practice is rooted in the study and understanding of the decorative arts and material culture, but I am not working decoratively with a historically decorative art material. And one of the ways that I abandon that is through the use of color, and the other way that I abandon that is through the control of the material in a traditional way.