Rinko Kawauchi at Arnolfini

Arnolfini

19 October 2024 – 16 February 2025

“When you are living a busy life, time passes instantly” the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi once remarked. “However, as I turn my attention to the small changes, I can feel time flowing more slowly.” The desire to crystallise time through photography lies at the heart of Kawauchi’s distinctive practice, which transforms mundane scenes from the everyday into the sublime. Lyrical and atmospheric, Kawauchi’s photographs are the centre focus of a show titled At the Edge of the Everyday World currently on view at The Arnolfini in Bristol.

At the Edge of the Everyday World immerses the viewer into four distinctive series AILA, Illuminance, Ametsuchi and M/E, all of which, in varying ways, reflect the artist’s keen observation of nature, from the delicate wings of a butterfly to a shadowy crescent moon hanging low in the night’s sky. Transience, the interconnectedness of things and the cyclical nature of life and death, thematically draws these works together, against the backdrop of the artist’s own aesthetic and ecological concerns. Her practice is rooted in an acute awareness of the earth’s frailty alongside the fleetingness of time – as if the latter is something that exists autonomously to the human lived experience. “It’s about creating mystery, but also expressing my own feelings about time passing, the fragility of life. They are metaphorical images, really, [about] how fragile our world is.”

For the Arnolfini show, the curators drew from the theories and style of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, a foundational text in postcolonial thought, in which the Martinique-born poet and writer described the world as a place of diverse chaos; constantly undergoing transformation. This strand of Glissant’s argument is mirrored in the artist’s approach to her subject matter, from the scorched fields she captures in the series Ametsuchi to the photographs of raindrops delicately balancing on cobwebs in M/E, a body of work taken in Iceland in the summer of 2019. Kawauchi intends to capture the interconnectedness of all things, as well as the liminal space existing between herself and the surrounding world. As curator Alejandro Acín writes, her work “is not about cause and effect; instead, it is about the expressiveness of a living reality in which the creative process is constantly bringing forth a multitude of fertile relationships.”

Born in 1972, Kawauchi was born in Shiga, a southern prefecture east of Kyoto, and began taking photographs when she was in high school. While studying graphic design at Seian University of Art and Design she realised she wanted to pursue photography more seriously and began working for commercial photography studios. In 2001, she gained international recognition for her trilogy of photobooks, Utatane, Hanako and Hanabi, which demonstrated her original vision in the field of photography. Aesthetically, her photos convey a dreamlike quality through a soft, nuanced palette, setting her apart from the school of post-war and Postmodern male Japanese street photographers who developed raw, gritty, black and white photography. In contrast, Kawauchi typically approaches her subjects with a different sensibility – they are carefully composed and convey tenderness and delicacy. Like a curator, she contemplates how her images work in dialogue with one another. Sequencing is central to her process, meaning that the single image should be interpreted against those that are displayed either side. In this sense her work acts as visual poetry or haiku, and even as a form of world-building.

Light is a significant inspiration and driving force. Through experimentation with light, Kawauchi illuminates overlooked elements of the natural world, but also confronts us with the bright exposure of her camera to imbue objects with a new sense of alienation and mystery. In the Illuminance series, the almost blinding light reflected on a motorcycle wing mirror takes on a sacred aura, and in M/E, rays of sunlight refracted on a raindrop are blown up for closer inspection. Like a painted still life, the artist monumentalises the minutiae of the everyday world, as seen in the photo of a peeled, sliced apple that sits on a blue ceramic plate as it slowly browns beneath a beam of sunlight.

Works in the Ametsuchi (2012–2013) series speak to her environmental concerns. She captures the volcanic landscapes of Japan’s Mount Aso, alongside images of grain fields burning – a consequence of a Japanese agricultural tradition that involves farming with fire and is known as noyaki (open burning), an annual ritual where grasslands are burned to maintain the ecosystem. In these shots, billowing dark smoke hangs in the sky beneath the red glare of flames beneath. During the creation of Ametsuchi the artist expressed a new understanding of her existence in the world: “standing by myself, solitary in that vast land, the feeling that I was living on this planet called Earth suddenly welled up inside me…[It] was something of an odd sensation. The awareness that my legs were, at that very moment, being pulled by gravity toward the Earth.” To experience the weight of existence, in a somatic, bodily sense has informed her vision ever since. This concept echoes ideas proposed by ecologically minded anthropologists such as Tim Ingold who argues that time should be comprehended as a physical, sensorial engagement with the world and is embedded in human action and movement.

At the heart of Kawauchi’s practice is a desire to communicate our complex relationship to time as well as the rich and complex textures of the material and natural world that often escape our notice. Her gaze accentuates the beauty of the ordinary, taking us to the edges of the everyday, to see the world afresh.

Lydia Figes, Curator of Digital

Rinko Kawauchi: At the edge of the everyday world

19 October 2024 – 16 February 2025, 11:00-18:00