How I Position My Work

I work with blown glass to create forms inspired by living things, food, nature, and the world around us.

When I make living creatures, I begin with bones and internal organs. Insects may begin as larvae or pupae, and flowers from seeds. When I make food, I prepare the individual elements and build the work step by step, almost as if I were cooking. Rather than simply reproducing a finished form, I am interested in showing how something comes into being and takes shape.

Growing up, I was often told to “be grateful for everything.” As I feel that gratitude toward life, nature, and the things around us is gradually being lost, I have come to think more about what I can do through my work as an artist. Through glass, I want to look again at the histories and processes behind things that we often overlook in everyday life.

Molten glass is constantly changing in the heat, and as it cools, it holds the form of a particular moment. While it is always changing during the making process, once finished, it can preserve that form for a long time. This quality is closely connected to my desire to give physical form to the fleeting processes through which life, food, and nature come into being.

Together with my team, I record these processes as moving-image works and share them with audiences around the world.

For me, the finished glass object is not the only work. The time and actions involved in bringing it into being are also part of the work. I see the films not simply as documentation of the making process, but as works in their own right and as an important part of my practice.

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The Sensibility Behind My Work

Compassion, gratitude, respect for things that cannot be seen, and the willingness to approach the same thing carefully, again and again.

I was born and raised in Japan in an environment where these values were important. Caring not only for people, but also for nature, objects, and the things around us is something I want to carry forward.

In Japan, there is the idea of yaoyorozu no kami, a way of thinking in which the sacred is believed to exist in countless things, from mountains and trees to stones and everyday objects.

For me, imagining that objects might have faces, eyes, or a presence of their own has always felt natural. This is one reason why motifs with eyes often appear in my work.

Paying attention to the smallest details is also, for me, a form of respect and affection. I feel that the sensibility I developed growing up in Japan naturally appears in this attention to detail.

What Has Influenced Me

My sensibility has been shaped by both Japanese culture and the anime, manga, and films I have been familiar with since childhood.

I have studied the koto since I was seven years old. While growing up with traditional culture, I was also drawn to the worlds of anime, manga, and film, where humor and sadness, cuteness and strangeness can exist side by side.

These forms of expression taught me that a world can be communicated through shape, color, and movement without having to explain everything in words.

Tradition and pop culture, discipline and freedom. Moving between these different worlds has shaped the way I see and make things today.