Dinosaur Figures

While travelling in Hokkaido, I viewed much of the landscape through a camera. When I lost that record, the place that had been before me suddenly receded. I could no longer tell how fully I had experienced the landscape with my own eyes and body.

From this experience, I first covered a carved wooden bear associated with Hokkaido in thick paint, then shifted to dinosaur figures. No one has seen a dinosaur’s actual appearance; only imagined forms are widely shared. As paint accumulates, the original colour and expression are concealed, and the surface form and texture become ambiguous. Covering a familiar object in paint is also a way of treating, in three dimensions, the distance between seeing something itself and knowing it through an image.