Yoko Ozawa
Making of 吹き溜まり Fukidamari — a bank of falling leaves 2023

single channel video
colour, sound, 5.09 mins

Courtesy and copyright of the artist

The falling leaves with the dust and sand blown by the wind and drifted into the bank, shaped themselves into a large vessel.

—Yoko Ozawa

Yoko’s video is a rumination on the making process for 吹き溜まり Fukidamari — a bank of falling leaves, 2023, her large-scale ceramic sculpture currently displayed as part of the NGV Melbourne Now exhibition Vessels. 

The curatorial concept of ‘large vessel’ was the starting point for Yoko’s questioning:

I began by digging a hole in the ground to make a mould. I asked myself a question. What might be the large vessel that envelops everything - the ocean, our bodies, the Earth?  

In the video, Yoko has captured herself at work, digging a hole in her friend’s garden to make a mould and pit-firing composite elements of the work in turn before returning to the studio to continue making.

Interspersed throughout are small moments of observation, where the artist has turned the lens on her surroundings – the atmosphere between objects and their surroundings (包まれる tsutsumareru).

Through the mode of video, the artist examines the essential elements of earth, fire and water, but also the everyday architecture, objects and things that speak to her emotional or spiritual connection to place and the inextricably linked act of making.

As for the original artwork, the video is a resonance on time and related notions of beauty and gratitude that draw from Japanese aesthetic traditions and the well-pool of Yoko’s innovative spirit. 

Read on to continue reading an interpretation of the video. To watch the video, press the button below. To return to the main menu, press this [hyperlink].

—Emma Thomson, correspondences

Reflection

As for everyday life, there is great emotional complexity and flux in the act of making art. In her choice of vignettes and still frames, Yoko conveys these shifts in the atmosphere of the video.

From the outset, there is beauty but also a pervading sense of solitude, at times loneliness even. That lone brick, surrounded by overgrown grass, is almost forgotten.

And yet, the bright sunlight captured in that first scene also speaks to the start of the day, the sense of anticipation and hopefulness one feels in the morning at the beginning of a project.

That wonderful sky-blue wheelbarrow next to the spade in the next scene perfectly captures that mood, laying the foundation for the industrious digging that follows.

The rhymical sound of the spade striking the earth as Yoko digs is familiar and comforting. It may be a reminder of our earliest childhood memories of digging, it may not.

Either way, there is a sense of gentle mindfulness in the rhymical way that Yoko digs into the earth, gradually revealing a complex web of tiny roots as she goes.

She continues to dig by hand – alone and then with the little dog Debbie - with a small spade, patting around the perimeter of an emerging, ‘unknowable’ shape in the earth. 

She asks: What might be the large vessel that envelops everything - the ocean, our bodies, the Earth? 

There is something about that gentle patting motion, the connection between hand and earth, the gentle gathering and sorting of earth and rocks, and the patience with Debbie as she also searches for the inexpressible.

It speaks to the artist’s faith that nature and the hands will reveal what is meant to be. She says:‘The falling leaves with the dust and sand blown by the wind and drifted into the bank, shaped themselves into a large vessel’.  

Like much of Yoko’s work, much is revealed in the shadows.

Glimpses of her sun hat, or its shadow, slip in and out of view, reminding us of her presence but also the changing presence of the sun that the hat shields her from.  

Indeed, as she continues her search, subtle shifts in light, shadow and sound work together to reveal the passing of time - the early morning brightness gives way to a soft afternoon glow, then darkness. 

With darkness and the sound of the cicadas in the evening, that familiar sense of solitude/loneliness returns.

But in the next scene, the mood shifts once more as Yoko playfully splats the mud/clay down onto the muslin to create the frame for the mould.

In the remaining scenes, there is the sense of the artist’s looking on with patience, waiting for the mould to dry (as Debbie takes an afternoon siesta) and the pit fire to burn, then smoke – once again conveying the passage of time. 

The Autumnal leaves on the tree that fall to the ground in the next scene again remind us of the passing season and of time, whose transient beauty exists day to day, sometimes beyond our comprehension, but is nevertheless there to understand if we care to notice.

In the final scenes, we cut to the studio, where we see many small ‘hat-shaped’ vessels – reminiscent of the distinctive hat Yoko wore as she worked - inside the cast made from the earth.

The presence of the cast reveals the sculpture’s form, the large once empty vessel that, in effect, now envelopes the artist as a container, a once empty vessel, now full of the artist’s spirit.

—Emma Thomson, correspondences