Work

I am not trying to recreate a tree stump.

One day, I saw a new shoot growing straight up from a cut tree stump. What I felt there was not loss, but a surprisingly strong vitality.

The tree had been cut, and its former form was gone. Yet the remaining base continued to support new life. That sight gave me a strong sense of hope.

Later, I realized that this feeling also resonated with my own experience of moving from Japan to the United States. Living away from my family and culture, and trying to take root in a new environment, I have lost some things and grown others.

The After the Cut series does not speak directly about that experience. Rather, it is my attempt to give form to the sense of continuing life and regeneration that I felt when I saw the cut stump.

The layers of clay are not meant to reproduce the tree itself, but to express the accumulation of time and the traces of change. The rhythmic forms that emerge from the center suggest the presence of life that continues even after the cut.

For me, a stump is not an ending. It is both a record of what has been lost and the beginning of what is yet to come.