They stand, once more, before the next name

The Beginning of Matter 

Glass is said to be the first artificial substance ever held in human hands. Pliny hands down the myth of glass accidentally forming on a Phoenician shore, yet archaeology points to a far older time. Traces of glass have been found in Mesopotamia as early as around 3500 BCE. It appeared, somewhere close to the human hand, amid an accumulation of nameless accidents: the overheating of a kiln, the chance alteration of a glaze. It was not an intended invention. When, by coincidence, the conditions happened to align, something that had until then been hidden within matter came, for the first time, to this side of things. Later a name was placed upon it, “glass,” and it was folded into a body of technique, assigned uses, sorted into categories. But before names were given — in that stretch of time when things were not yet anything at all — what was taking place? The series Chimura calls “The Experiment on the Origin” departs from precisely this question. 

Silicon, the principal element of glass, and the tin that comes to be sealed within it were both once born in the cores of stars. Released into cosmic space with the death of those stars, and after billions of years, they meet again, here and now. What gives form to that encounter is no blueprint. The interior of a star and the furnace of a workshop are alike: unstable milieus, into which energy continually flows and from which it continually dissipates. Only in the thick of such instability does structure rise up of its own accord. 

One would like, here, to stand in that place of beginning. Heat fills the space, warps the air, bends the light. Sweat beads and falls. Within the kiln, which radiates like a star, molten glass lies pooled like a sea. Molten glass is gathered onto the tip of the blowpipe, turned, urged toward form. Yet the material sags under its own weight, swells with heat, lengthens under the pull of spin. The same motion is repeated, and with each repetition a different negotiation of forces is carried on between material and body. Turn. Stretch. Join. Cut. Shape. Heat again. The reason this work can come into being is that I have come to know the glass this far: these are words Chimura remembers carrying with him. But such knowledge is not held for the sake of bending matter to one’s will. He learns in order to answer material on its own terms. His technique is oriented not toward mastery, but toward response. 

Within the transparent body of glass, tin has been sealed. Molten tin meets the heat held by the glass, and in the course of cooling it warps and sets. Ordinarily, the insertion of a foreign element would bring about a fatal fissure. Materials whose coefficients of expansion differ generate internal stresses as they cool, and carry themselves toward rupture. Chimura reaches toward that very limit, again and again. When materials of different densities meet in a molten state, tin, heavier than glass, begins to sink within. Spun on the pipe, it is drawn outward by centrifugal force. Difference in density, the stress of expansion and contraction, gravity, centrifugal force: several conditions press against one another at once, and within their crossing the metal moves through the glass in ways no one can fully foresee. It is to place oneself in the zone between control and collapse; it is a way of keeping company with matter, waiting for the moment when form rises of its own accord. The cooled glass is hard, and silent. A material that had held such heat is, to the hand, cold. 

Look at the object. The transparent mass of glass carries an irregular ridgeline, as if the movement of melting had been frozen exactly where it stood: sharpened in one place, undulating in another, drooping, and breaking off. Seen from any angle, no two profiles are the same. Scattered within its interior are grains of silver-colored tin. Some grains have sunk; others float; still others have come to rest in the position where they were last carried along. They are the traces of a tug-of-war among weight, gravity and spin, and the position of the metal itself records which force held the upper hand at which instant. Each time light passes through the glass, the grains of tin glimmer dully, and the depth within seems to sway. Inside that interior, the whole sequence of making, the forces and the time the material has passed through, is preserved as it was. Chimura calls glass “an excellent hard disk.” It is a recording device of personal memory, one that inscribes the very process of change itself. 

The forces and the time that glass records — this material fact is hardly Chimura’s discovery alone. The combining of glass and metal already has its accumulated history within the ceramic and glass arts. In craft, material is that which the maker, by way of technique, brings under control and guides toward an intended form. What Chimura is doing before the furnace is, however, an undertaking of another order. It is not a material experiment. No one can fully determine what shape molten tin will take inside glass. In the crossing of gravity, centrifugal force, surface tension and the rest, matter begins to act in ways no one foresaw. Chimura does not banish that unforeseeability; he arranges the conditions under which it can appear, and he answers what appears. It is a back-and-forth of calling and answering. Where craft asks how this material is to be handled, Chimura turns the question around and asks what this material is asking for. And that turning-back of the question cannot be completed within any single object. 

No single work standing in the exhibition space, Chimura insists, carries meaning on its own. Only as several objects gather and begin to relate to one another does something first come to be spoken. In addition to “The Experiment on the Origin” series, this exhibition unfolds an installation that clothes the gallery itself in a sheet of transparent vinyl. The architectural skeleton of the space is wrapped in a membrane of vinyl transformed by heat and comes to wear another skin. Vinyl, too, is a material that alters its shape under the pressure of heat. Chimura faces this material with the same attitude as he faces glass. He gives heat, lets transformation happen, and accepts the shape in which the material has answered. Within a space where object and installation exist alongside each other, the memory of time and force that runs between shape and shape begins to weave the entire room into a single piece of speaking. 

Running beneath this exhibition is a certain quiet loneliness. Before the furnace, the body is nearly swallowed by the sheer mass of heat held by the melting glass. And yet when the hand finally touches the cooled glass, one notices that not a trace of that heat remains anywhere. The feeling of one’s temperature being drawn away. A person stops, just short of that threshold. Once cooled, a thing never returns to the same heat again. The objects that stand quietly in the exhibition room are the stilled figures of structures that were born in white-hot conditions and have since passed through cooling into silence. To see this exhibition from a point far in the future would be to see the quietly aligned traces of a past that must once have been abundant: such is the temporal distance that Chimura imagines. Loneliness, perhaps, is the awareness that the human being cannot quite answer the thickness of time that matter keeps addressing to us. And it is for this reason that, again and again, he returns to stand before the furnace. 

The time before names have been placed upon things. The instants in which one thing meets another, and something that had not been there until that moment comes into being. Before the furnace of the workshop, Yohei Chimura is trying, again and again, to answer those beginnings.