Original copy of the children’s book titled The Adventures of Miss Minette and Master Jocko: To which is Added The Marvelous Adventures of Dame Trot and Her Wonderful Cat. Published in 1850

The photographs in this article are from an installation by artist Fumio Tachibana. The photographer is Yasuhide Kuge. This exhibition was the first time I had consciously experienced the artist, his inspiration, materials, work, and working space as inseparable. Tachibana is someone who has mastered the art of evocation. The re-purposing and re-imagining of “fragments” woven or arranged into a new whole is a important concept in my own work.

His subject is Clara, a fashion institute for western style dressmaking in Japan, founded and run by Motoko and Shiro Koike in 1923. They also published a fashion magazine called Yosai Shunju. The building was demolished and the magazine banned during World War 2 in 1944. I’ll take a wild guess that anything to do with western culture was not at all popular in Japan during that time. Motoko revived the institute as a classroom studio in the 1950s. When the studio was dismantled, Fumio Tachibana collected and reorganized the fragments of Motoko’s work and materials (drawings, sketches, dressmaking patterns, postwar Japanese handbills, wrapping paper, silk thread, and printing equipment) into a large scale installation of new artworks and arrangements in their own space so that the classroom itself was part of the work. There is something powerful going on here in that Motoko’s presence is strongly felt in the photographs.

Source: Communion W, 2001 Curator: Can Wong

The handwritten pages of a notebook on geography and surveying, kept by Joshua Tevis in 1804.

 Although I would never again wish to live in a city, I have a fascination with small urban gardens and allotments. There is such an abundance of charm in small gardens with their clever use of structures and strategic plantings. The victory gardens on the Fenway create an oasis in the midst of crowds, cars, and chaos.

There are rusty nails and thorny branches all over the posts and gates. I know they are there to discourage vandals and thieves yet no less beautiful and sculptural in this context.

Mixed media art by Mother Nature in fungus on tree bark. Found in our wood pile and almost tossed into the fire.

I wonder about the person who created it and kept it much like I keep paper journals of collage and personal notes never thinking anyone will see them. It probably never occurred to her that almost one hundred years later, someone else would find it and look at it with fascination as though a work of art.

It amazes me that a delicate personal thing like this survives for so long and finds a new audience and a purpose when many deliberate works of art from that time are long gone and forgotten. I enjoy the fanciful idea that it was a sheer act of will or a guided serendipity. It is at least a reminder that even the most ordinary and casual seeming of objects may have a path and purpose that is beyond us and surpasses our best laid plans. We do not decide what will be remembered and cherished. It’s no wonder that I find dusty old antique shops and flea markets far more interesting than museums and art galleries.