Between intuition and reason

I met Shigeko Hirakawa during her participation in an "in situ" exhibition of Japanese sculpture organised by the town of Mont-de-Marsan in May 1997.  I was greatly impressed by the clarity and precision of her contribution to the project. In the town centre, where the rivers Midou and Douze meet to form the Midouze, she had a series of heavy tree trunks distributed inside the old semi-circular building that houses the traditional watering place that one still finds in many French towns.  These trunks, placed in the shallow water and extending to the ceiling of the open structure, are cut by a translucent ring of green resin.  Downstream from the bridge over the river Midouze she designed a path which meandered along the banks of the river connecting five ellipses dug in the ground. These cavities were alternately filled with tree stumps and logs. The layout of this path, with its emphasis on the ellipse, gave a certain dignity back to the neglected contours of the river banks, asserting, through a dialectic gesture, a strong existential presence.  It recalled, through the solidity of the soil and the jagged slenderness of the roots, the never-ending oscillation between full and empty, life and death.

So it was in February 1998, with the impressive energy of her land art fixed in my mind, that I saw the recent work of Shigeko Hirakawa in Choisy-le-Roi. Here the more intimate aspect of her work was represented and I was not the least bit disappointed.  I found in her paintings and sculptures the same incisive clarity of exactness that characterized the forms she developed in dividing up the banks of a river. Her assemblage sculptures of MDF with their swelling curves, evoke images of the sinuous lines of waterfalls, or cascades of twisting gutters. The pieces placed flat on the ground also bring to mind the elliptical fluidity of an undulating surface, affirming, through the clear tones of the beige fibreboard, thepowerful impression of an existential territory. In the paintings of Shigeko Hirakawa - washed-out canvases, corroded by detergent acid and stretched on irregular shaped panels - one can imagine amoebic configurations in the paintings diluted nucleuii, or even some fantastic spermatophyte viewed under a biologist's microscope, ready to be cloned.

The conception of these interior works preceded the "in situ" project in Mont-de-Marsan and are a clear illustration of the osmotic sensibility of the artist : they constitute, each in its own way, a sort of model of free space, and it's in coming into contact with this space that the creative reflection of the artist fosters harmony between intuition and reason. The spatial imagination of Shigeko Hirakawa is invigorated by a deep vitality and a vast vision where her refined understanding of ecology is linked to her continual contemplation of the evolution of being. It is with the twin sources - realist / spiritual - that the artist constantly consolidates and expands her conceptual range. In her obstinacy to accomplish her work and to do so with precision, she's not unlike some sort of extraordinary ant toiling away relentlessly.

At the risk of intruding on her modesty, I entertain great ambition for Shigeko Hirakawa : she's an artist at the frontier between the modernist materialism of land art and the "neo-Zen" of Mono-ha, and as such she should assert a genuinely original place of her very own.

I think that this concluding aspiration for Shigeko Hirakawa gives my text its true meaning.