‘My work is
always growing, growing, growing, very organic and I don’t really know where to
go and how it’s going to turn out …’
Chaco
Kato, 1999, Talk – artists initiative – Conversation between Mary-Louise
Edwards, Chaco Kato and Sandra Bridie
Chaco Kato’s creations are ephemeral, fragile and
poetic, cognizant of precarious interdependencies between art, humanity and
nature. Kato frequently recycles found materials.
To my mind Chaco Kato’s work very much reflects her
background. Kato grew up in a Japanese city surrounded by mountains. It is not
often one writes of artists’ backgrounds these days – the art world is a global
world, artists are peripatetic, it almost seems small-minded to put one in a
box of cultural ‘background’. However I first met Chaco in 1998, two years
after she arrived in Australia and it seems to me that her thinking and her
artwork remain very much influenced by her homeland, (and its spirit), and that
this is not a bad thing given the contemporary homogenizing of art that seems
more often than not to threaten or eradicate (what I feel are crucial) cultural
origins.
While indulging in this ‘background business’, it is
worth noting too that Kato’s initial tertiary studies were in creative writing
and I think, if I recall correctly, her artwork developed from a desire to
illustrate her writing, particularly that work written for children.
Kato’s studies and studios have spanned the world –
from Japan to the US, to France to Australia.
This global awareness of Kato’s is also a significant influence, in the
sense that it seems, ironically, to have allowed her to stay closer to her
origins, and yet to care about ‘the whole’. Or perhaps it is her Buddhist
belief, carried everywhere, an indelible tie between life, death and rebirth, ‘the
circulation of lives’, that endows her work with a significant sense of homage
to the natural world and its care, and thus the universals in the local become
the greater whole – spreading, ‘growing’, as she observed in 1999, organically.
This ‘circulation of lives’ very much embraces
childhood – that purely instinctive place of great art – Kato notes:
The process of art making
brings me back to my lost childhood. It provides me an extraordinary sense of
pleasure and bliss. I hope my work can help take your mind to your childhood as
well.
(Artist’s website, artist’s notes – The
Utopia of Childhood)
The simple impulse seems naturally to lead to Slow
Art, a thinking, (or should that be an unconsciousness), that dovetails
seamlessly with Kato’s creative ‘manner’. She recalls the observation of Robert
Hughes, on the subject[1]
‘What we need more of is slow art, art that holds
time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception. … It doesn’t get its
message across in ten seconds, … that hooks onto something deep-running in our
natures.’
And to that Kato adds her own precepts:
Focus on a process of art making rather than object making. The
work always changes subtly, and grows like a living organism.
Create art works on site from zero, and use the gallery as a
studio. Spend time on site to experience the space, physically and internally.
When the exhibition finishes, go back to zero. Seek the meaning of artwork that
doesn’t last.
Use simple materials and methodology, choose materials that
connect with my life.
Blur the border
between artist and audience. Also try to involve other people in the process of
art making.
(Artist’s notes, artist’s website: Art and sustainability) chacokato.com
I read, write and let’s face it, CUT and PASTE (at
least some of this), in Beeac, a place my 30+ y.o. sons find hard to visit – it
is a backwater, off the map, odd. Personally I find it the perfect place to tap
into the energy that is Chaco Kato’s: work on site from zero; experience the
space – physically and internally; use simple materials; blur the BORDER
between artist and audience; involve other people; focus on the process of
making, just making.
This WINDOWSPACE exhibit is a photographic record of
the work Chaco Kato created in 2014 for the Lorne Sculpture Biennale, uncannily
it is also the very foreshore location that Carolyn
Cardinet (WINDOWSPACE, 2015), will explore for the Biennale in 2016. Exciting.
AS
[1]Chaco Kato, Artist’s
website, artist’s notes: art and sustainability, For the Forum: Embodied Energy, June 2008, referencing Robert Hughes at the Royal
Academy Annual Dinner, June 2004.
