NOBUKO TSUCHIYA

‘It fills all Space, and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that it hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!’

‘Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degree they will dawn on you.’

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott, 1884.

Nobuko Tsuchiya’s works are like little engines of atavistic agency. Clusters and coagulations of materials and matter that –despite their precarious, hybrid materiality – seem to activate and engage with realms beyond the purely physical, opening out into unfamiliar and enigmatic dimensions. For Tsuchiya, the space between the work is as full and fragile as the sculptures themselves.There is no such thing as empty space; we are abroad in a universe thick with invisible energies, forces and matter.

Arranged across the walls and floors, unfolding through the gallery space as an interconnected, active environment, her works operate less like an exhibition of discrete objects and more like a field of highly-charged relations. Organic shapes emerge from industrial components; works teeter at the threshold of collapse or accretion; forms flicker between various states of becoming – solid or liquid, light or sound, vibration or volume, map or model. Everything a part of everything else now; each element an awkward analogue for an elusive, disembodied, sensorial consciousness:

“Physicists say the universe is made of ten dimensions, and if I returned to a particle, I might be able to feel them all. Would I still have sensations, moods, or any sense of awareness? A particle’s life must stretch across tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of millions of years. And if it felt anything like the calm of my sleep now, it would surely be wonderful.”

–Inner Monologue, Nobuko Tsuchiya, 2026.