My work does not begin by giving form to meaning or value decided in advance. Through a necessity that arises within the act of making, the several possibilities present in a situation rise up as one particular, concrete thing. Only then, I think, can it be called a work.
At the centre of my practice is a conviction that methods of observation should not be taken ready-made from existing instruments and classifications, but built up from my own thinking and from experience as it arises in the field. Working with weather, wind, waves, stones, drift objects, seaweed, the body, sound, light, language, and meteorological data, I ask what we call observation, and under what conditions a thing becomes perceptible as itself.
For me, weather is not an object to be represented within a work. It is the medium through which we feel, move, think, and touch others and the environment — a model of thought that supports the whole practice. Sound and light, too, are not means of expression added to the world from outside, but fluid media in which we are already placed. What I call weather may be a state in which several flows — not only wind, temperature, and humidity, but also sound, light, and language — appear within everyday life.
Seen this way, there is no need to set up in advance a one-directional conversion of weather into sound or light. It is only because we separate weather and sound as different things that one must be made to correspond to the other. But if we grasp both as flows on the same plane, the distinctions between observation and expression, receiving and sending, input and output, are no longer fixed. Rather than processing information gathered by observation into a work afterwards, I aim for a making in which observing, receiving, and bringing something into being become a single act.
One aim of my practice is to open a path, at the largest possible scale, between body and nature, or body and environment. From the sensation of a single body it connects out to wind, tides, terrain, season, geological time, and scales of environment that exceed the human, and moves back and forth between them. This path is not a one-way route by which the body comes to understand nature. It is a two-way passage: the environment changes the body, and as the body changes, so does the way the environment appears.
At the same time, I do not see the path's only role as reaching a destination fixed in advance. In moving between body and environment, I hold it important to find and pick up what slips out of plans and classifications — unforeseen phenomena, sensations that have no name yet. Fieldwork is not only the task of confirming a hypothesis already formed; it is also a place where one's own thinking and methods can be changed by what is unexpected.
The ground of this practice has been fieldwork, ongoing since 2016, on Futaomotejima, an uninhabited island in the Seto Inland Sea. With my range of movement limited by the rise and fall of the tide, I have spent time among waves, wind, drift objects, seawater, the smell of decaying matter, light, and the sound of ships passing far off.
On the island there is almost nothing to do. Watching the waves, looking toward where the wind comes from, listening to distant sounds, I tune my body to the time of the tides. Placed for long in the same environment, the tuning of perception slowly shifts, and a single wave, a single grain of sand, a single drifting thing catching the light appears not as one instance of a general name or class, but as a being proper to itself.
To recognise the styrofoam, plastic, and driftwood I picked up on the island by their given names began to feel wrong, and I came to rename them each time, according to the form, texture, smell, and way of catching light in front of me. This is not to replace them with poetic metaphor. It is a way of not leaving untended the gap between what I actually perceive and the words that already exist.
As far as possible, I want to observe things without counting them. Whether a natural phenomenon or a social event, I want to think slowly, one thing at a time, before gathering them into a single story or replacing them with a metaphor that means something else. For this reason I sometimes place a thing in a work as itself, rather than using it as a symbol.
This attitude connects to an interest in Duns Scotus's haecceitas, or "thisness" — a concept for thinking not of a thing as one instance of a universal category, but of its existing, in this place and this time, as itself and nothing else. I am looking for ways to receive a certain shore, a certain wind, the light of a certain moment, a certain material, not as an interchangeable example but as itself.
At the same time, when a particular being is placed within the larger scales of weather and weathering that exceed the human, things I had thought wholly different can come to feel like different appearances of the same being or motion. Sound, light, and language, though different media, can each be experienced as waves that travel through time and touch the body. The cold air of a wind cave and a distant season, a drift object and geological time, a single body and the environment of an entire coast — by changing scale, these appear as continuous with one another.
My work is also a preparing of the conditions to experience that contradictory reality in which the same appears as different and the different as the same. There, rather than choosing between particularity and continuity, I want to hold a state in which one thing is itself and, at the same time, connected to others.
Between this particularity and continuity, I believe a kind of common sense can arise. By common sense I do not mean the received wisdom already shared within a society. It is a shareability of sensation, opened temporarily in a place as different people, bodies, materials, and environments touch the same phenomenon. It is owned by no single person; it arises and is renewed, each time, between several beings.
The practice that began on Futaomotejima has connected, since 2017, to research in Tōhoku and Hokkaidō on wind caves, local winds, weather lore, and coastal environments. Returning repeatedly to the wind caves of Akita and Aomori, the Kiyokawa-dashi local wind of the Shōnai region, the Oga Peninsula, the coasts of Sakata, Akita, and Aomori, and the distinctive weather of Hokkaidō, I research not only the phenomena themselves but the local language, bodily knowledge, and habits of life through which they have been received.
At a wind cave, a temperature unlike the season at the surface flows out from the gaps in the rock. Holding my hand to it, I felt that I, too — observing weather as an external object — am a being shaped, each time, by contact with that heat and cold. Futaomotejima, the wind caves, local winds, and drift objects are each different places and phenomena, yet continuous in this: that through contact with times and environments exceeding the human scale, they change the very nature of perception.
From 2026, as an overseas research fellow of the Pola Art Foundation, I am based in Scotland, researching weather lore, coastal ecologies, Gaelic meteorological vocabulary, seaweed, and shoreline environments. This is not a separate research apart from the practice in Tōhoku and Hokkaidō. Holding to the specificity of each place, it is a process of moving back and forth between how people have received weather and passed it on — as language, gesture, habit, and material technique — and of renewing the method of observation itself.
Since 2021 I have carried this practice forward in an open form called "Weathering with ...". I do not decide before making what is placed after the "with". Rather than fixing in advance what I will enter into relation with, I wait for what is met repeatedly in the field, and what returns, to rise up out of the practice itself. Keeping this open state is an important stance for not letting fieldwork become the collecting of material to realise a plan already made.
I work with installation, sound, light, performance, moving image, text, observation devices, meteorological data, seaweed, and drift objects, among others. But I do not set the medium or the finished form in advance. I choose methods according to the relations and phenomena that arise on site, and I care that thinking is reflected not only in a work's content but in the structure of its devices, the handling of materials, the design of time, and the actions of the audience.
At the same time, I hold it important not to close ideas and concepts into a form only those with specialist knowledge can understand. Through bodily experience — touching wind, feeling temperature, hearing sound, seeing light, placing a hand on something — I want to make a state in which one can take part in the phenomenon occurring there, before understanding any explanation. Not to simplify the complexity of thought, but to open that complexity as concrete experience.
In my work the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, between the human as subject and the environment as object, and between artist and work, are not fixed. As devices, body, wind, sound, light, and material act on one another, no single one governs the phenomenon; the relation itself rises up as the work. More than a finished object, the work becomes a concrete event arising temporarily between people, things, and environment.
I also note that a practice like this holds the possibility of connecting to feminism. This does not mean adding feminism to the work as an external theory. It means not treating the observing subject as neutral and universal, but asking where that body is positioned, what it depends on, by what it is wounded, and by what it is supported; considering who observes, whose experience and knowledge are recorded, and who can access a place or its information; and placing the human not as a closed, autonomous individual but back within interdependence with others, environment, and matter. These are deeply connected to the ways I have tried, until now, to open a path between body and nature.
I also need to attend not to extracting local weather knowledge and knowledge of life from outside to use in a work, but to the relationships with the people who have carried that knowledge, to consent, to what has gone unspoken, and to what has fallen out of the record. For me this awareness is not an already established theoretical position, but an entry point for questioning, more concretely from here on, my methods of observation, my devices, my fieldwork, and the ways I collaborate with others.
I do not conclude that I have understood a place through a short stay. Returning to the same place again and again, experiencing differences of season and weather, I accept that my observation and interpretation change. Rather than harvesting local knowledge from outside to use in a work, I want to keep room for my own method to be changed by relationships with local people, materials, and environment.
When a situation cannot be neatly resolved, and it is not even certain that art can exist there, the body accumulated through making until then is put to the test. To cultivate a body able to respond to what needs to be made in such a place is, for me, an important aim of making.
Not to treat observation and expression, nature and the artificial, input and output, the human and the environment as separated in advance. To open a large-scale path between body and nature, and to pick up the unexpected in moving back and forth along it. Not to generalise a particular being, but to receive it as itself; and at the same time not to lose sight of the continuity that appears between different things. Not to close complex thought into explanation, but to open it as experience touchable through the body. And to keep room for one's thinking and methods of making to change through relationships with places and others. These are the attitudes that run through all my activity.