Kimio Tsuchiya: Landscape in silence

Kimio Tsuchiya's interest in sculpture began in the mid 1980s after seeing the work of Richard Long and the Japanese Mono-ha artists, including Lee U-Fan (represented in the QAGOMA Collection), and others who have explored the relationships between man, nature and time. Tsuchiya's first degree in architecture has influenced his work as an artist, particularly aspects of scale, space and the placement of objects in architectural terms. Tsuchiya has developed a refined and sensitive art practice which investigates environmental and societal changes during the last century.

Tsuchiya made his early sculptures from found materials, pieces of driftwood, left over scraps from demolition sites, collections of fragmented stone and metal, and pieces of chipped wood. These were materials of no significant value; they are discarded resources. Tsuchiya's early works were fuelled by the economic boom in Japan in the 1980s and the parallel shift in social values where mass consumption and material growth were sought and cultivated. This experience was mirrored in England in the 1980s when Thatcherism and economic rationalism was prevalent.

By the early 1990s Tsuchiya was collecting materials for his monochromatic assembled sculptures from the sites of demolished houses, a significant shift from the earlier ad hoc selections. With the wreckage Tsuchiya remade smashed dwellings into contained installations. They are the stacked, carefully sorted collections of memories of homes. Ash first appeared in his work in 1992 in the work Absence. The ash is made by burning, powdering and sifting parts of collected wreckage which is placed inside glass containers made from old windows.

The work Landscape in silence is an arrangement of tree roots covered with a layer of fine ash under a shallow glass dome made of large fragments of glass. Central to this work are notions of destruction and regeneration. It is a metaphoric display of the disintegration of family and also of the unending momentum of time. Ash has associated myths with life and death: it is the final physical state of all living matter in its dead form. Ash is also life giving, it is associated with regeneration and new growth; it contains vital nutrients to encourage and sustain new life. Tsuchiya's use of ash extends to include both the symbols of cycle of life, death and rebirth, as well as the destruction of a particular traditional home life.