AMABIKI 2011 In the midst of winter
Back to the Beginning

There was a letter from the artists who established the first exhibition, inviting people to participate in the Amabiki Village and Sculpture event. I still remember how truly passionate and sincere it was. I liked what it said and have participated in the Amabiki Village and Sculpture exhibition since the second event. Since then, the exhibition has expected the artists to put in the hard work of running the event for themselves, and in exchange, it has respected their individual expressive efforts, while searching, with an unwavering stance, for the ideal form of exhibition. The way the artists, doing away with frills of all kinds and working with a kind of austerity, build this kind of outdoor exhibition, is now very important.
While the outdoor exhibition has come around every two years, as a venue for artists to explore their own potential for expression, it has become even more important as a precious opportunity for artists to meet colleagues and their works, and stimulate each other.
Around the time when that process reached the seventh exhibition, I fell ill with a serious disease and was repeatedly hospitalized. The situation was serious, and not a time for creating art. I had a sketchbook by my hospital bed, but didn't have the spirit to draw a single stroke. Unavoidably, I had to give up on the seventh exhibition.
Three years passed, then I came back to Amabiki, to exhibit my work in the eighth exhibition.
Helped by many people, the will to live, and to create, somehow guided me to Amabiki. I started walking around this beautiful village for the first time in a long while, looking for a suitable site for my work. Our forefathers drew pictures in caves long ago, or erected giant stones on hilltops. Expression emerges in its own right place, and perhaps the search to find that place is a desire and a creative wellspring that is fundamentally innate in people as they try to express themselves. I was brought up in the mountains of the Hokuriku region, and when I was in junior high school, I was unavoidably fascinated by a giant rock poking out of a river. I thought of cutting a hole into the tip of that rock. Lacking the right tools, it took three years before I finally managed to pierce the rock with a hole. I wonder if that was the starting point? Thinking of things like that, I move on through beautiful scenery. I have already begun the process of creating my art in Amabiki.
And that brings me to this year's Amabiki Village and Sculpture exhibition.
The backdrop will be "in the midst of winter". It is a season in which creatures sleep and people turn to indoor work. Perhaps it is the nature of artists, or really the character of Amabiki, to overturn that natural rhythm and stage an outdoor exhibition.
Over these three years, I have slept so much it disgusts me. I'm done with medicines that are like filthy poisons. Imagining the artworks dotted amid the winter scenery of Amabiki, I am longing to meet and join a group of 42 artists and their works.

MURAKAMI Tsukumo, participating artist