" My work mainly consists in transforming a space in order to give him a singular aspect by large-sized installations, on the topic of the appropriation of nature by man, or of man by society.
I was born in Japan and lived my childhood in several areas where the way of life, the habits and the dialects were very different. With each change of place, the first question was to set out again to zero and of knowing how to fit, how to begin a new life. When I arrived to France in 1983, I found the cultural differences so important, that they made me face again this problem of integration. Nobody lives independently of his environment, and one is forced to belong to the society in which one lives. This need of belonging to surrounding world expresses also in nature, which is structured by man in a phenomenon of appropriation which mixes good and bad, and governs in various forms the whole planet.
My work tries to make images emerge from relationship with nature ; under the space and visual component, they always have a metaphorical structure and symbolic system. In the series of work "Discolouration ", developed between 1990 and 1999, I chose to fade, withe a chimical substance (Javel), industrially coloured fabrics. In this natural process, I was interfering on a fragile balance between time which tended to destroy fabric gradually, and exposition with the solar rays which accelerated discolouration. The ensemble functioned like a metaphor of purifying, which reveals the nature of the things and the beings, but can also destroy them.
From this experiment of co-operation with sun and time, I started to look further into work in outside, with nature. For example, the creation "Spinning Ellipses" conceived in 1992 in the departmental park of St-Jean-of-Braye (France), used water and grass as tools. With its ellipses of grass transplanted out of the lawn, towards under wood, in height, it described in a hidden way the vulnerability of what is detached from its usual environnement.
The works " Genealogic Tree/Death " and " Transmutation/Life", made in Mont-de-Marsan (France) in 1997, employed water, trunks of maritime pines, the ground, and forty stocks of oak stumps of approximatively a ton each. Works were located on both sides of a river to which they gave the dimension of a border between two worlds."
Septembre 2000 Shigeko HIRAKAWA
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(photographs by the artist)
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Untitled sculpture
1995? 260 x 130 x 100 cm.
Discolouration
1995-1996, diameter : 150 cm.
Installations
On the left : Five red spheres, 1999, permanent installation, Mathematical Sciences Department, Tôkyô University, 154 cm diameter for each element, total lenght : 14,90 m.
On the right : De-paint 1-4, 1996-1997, Choisy-le-Roi, 750 x 275 x 10 cm.
Spinning Ellipses
Departmental park of Saint-Jean-de-Braye, 1992. Five four meters
length elliptic basins, laid out on an arc of ellipse of thirty meters. The basins are filled with fluorescent water and
contain a copper foil. Five elevated ellipses of grass prolong in the wood the series of the basins cut out in the lawn of the park.
The topic of the ellipse frequently returns in Hirakawa's work. This form is that which takes a compressed terrestrial sphere or the spiral of a magnetic field flattened. But the ellipse is also the term which indicates the omission of one or more words by implying them, and it comes from Latin ellipsis or Greek elleipsis.
Genealogic Tree/ Death
Silguy
quay, Mount-of-Marsan, 130 meters length, five ellipses
containing forty stocks of oaks (between 800 and 1000 kilos each one), red sand, 30 balls of pines of the French Moors
(approximately 400 X 60 cm each) .
The elliptic forms punctuated a path traced on bank of Midouze River. The ellipses, five as the directions, held within their center fragments of trees, or the vacuum, synonymous with death.
Transmutation/Life
" La Cale de l'Abreuvoir ", Mont-de-Marsan, 12 balls of maritime pine (diameter: 40 cm), resin polyester, spring water.
The balls of pines emerged from water, vital element. Polyester resin rings divided in two parts the trunks which transpierced the thick cover in a dash of life.
On the left : Eye, 2000, plastic, fluorescent water, diameter : 130 cm.
On the right : Toric water, 1995, plastic, fluorescent water, diameter : 250 cm.