Ebb & Flow: Bookworks by Yoko Terauchi from the Research Library Audio guide

Transcript

Stop 15.

This display highlights artists’ books by Japanese artist Yoko Terauchi, born in 1954. As a student in Japan, Terauchi made abstract sculptures using steel. In 1979 she came to study on the Postgraduate, Advanced course in sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, where the sculptor, Anthony Caro had inspired a new generation of artists to work with sheet metal. As a post-graduate student Terauchi began to question the idea of making sculpture about form for aesthetic satisfaction. Her aim changed to making artwork to convey her way of seeing the world. “World is One there is no divisions”

Five limited edition bookworks produced by Coracle Press are on display, along with group publications and photographs of site-specific installations.

The bookwork, Terra includes cut drawings made by cutting through the top sheet of two layers of paper and transferring pigment, creating corresponding ‘shadow’ images on the lower sheet. A later work, Ebb & Flow, made in 1988 is a folded rectangle sheet of paper painted red on one side and blue on the other, torn diagonally to reveal the inner structure. With no fixed beginning or end, it challenges binary distinctions such as front and back, inside and outside, or more and less. There is a film on view of the pages being turned.

Speaking of the concept that has been at the centre of her work for the last 40 years, Terauchi says,

“One of the striking things I realised after I came to London was when we discuss things, my classmates often commented “You are wrong”, “This is right”. This made me wonder why they are so confident to say right and wrong.

The year I came to London, 1979, was also the year so many political conflicts happened. Those social issue also makes you think about right and wrong since each side of war/conflict says I am right.

I see the world as one, which does not have separation, it is us who creates divisions/opposites because we judge the world from our point of view as if we are the centre of the world, although we can only see / know a part of the whole world.

I started using paper as a material to demonstrate there is no front/ back, no oppositional division. There is only one continuous plane. I think paper is a three-dimensional material with six sides, therefore the surface of one sheet of paper has one continuous surface.”

All the works on display are drawn from the Henry Moore Institute Research Library. You can find out more about Yoko Terauchi’s practice in the library through catalogues and documentation.

This is the end of Stop 15.