When an artist speaks of his work, it is as if he has to recount a part of his life. I am not naturally very open. I must therefore make an effort to overcome my shyness and transform my wandering thoughts into articulate sentences.
     
           
 
As a child, death had no meaning for me, even as my family members worried themselves about my weak constitution. Much later, when I understood that death was unavoidable, I understood the meaning of my life. After reading Mishima and Endo, I intermingled life and death in my engravings. I wished to express an idea of eternity or rather my desire to believe in Metempsycosis, but my production during my first ten years as an engraver was too influenced by western art.
Paradoxically, it was by moving myself to Paris that I could find my artistic expression - a free space where different cultures combine - to create my own artistic language.
      
           
 
It is with an azalea flower cut in my native region of Gun-Ma in Japan that I began to engrave the plant world. Today, I don't know how many plants I have registered on copper... but I must continue.
When I choose a vegetable, most often a simple plant without symbolic ornament, or a seed, it is at first sight its shape which attracts me ; I extract it from its environment and look at it only for itself. In delineating it, no thought comes to disturb this moment of concentration. The shape appears on the copper plate little by little until reaching a finished state. Each plate represents a unique moment, an element of my memory. They are words, impressions of déjà-vu which rise again to the surface of my conscience each time I use them. When this unique shape combines with others to create a new engraving, I look to recompose a memory from these fragmented recollections which is neither a journal, nor a botanist's hebarium but rather a reflection on time.
      
           
 
My work is an abstract representation of nature which allows me to create a figurative representation of time. I don't perceive time as being linear, a line ending up in death. I want to experience time on the scale of the universe rather than on that of man. It is like a mass, a volume where each engraved element represents a point which relates as well as to the future as to the past. Engravings are essays for holding oneself at the border of the finite and the infinite : the finite because these plate is engraved, passed in an acid bath ... but it carries in itself an infinite potential because in combining it with others, I can indefinitely compose new engravings. Only the etching technique gives me this freedom with time.
     
           
 
Beyond all these explanations, what I give to the viewer is not a history but rather a poem which each reads in his own way. You may be touched or disappointed by my sense of the aesthetic. But it is a sense which develops in the pleasure of creation,the pleasure of touch... pleasure that I'd like to communicate to you through sight.
      
           
   
Tomohide Kameyama