Kay Fingerle was Artist in Residence at the Villa Kamogawa of the Goethe-Institut in Kyoto in the summer of 2019. There she investigated „Built Images of Nature“ as architecture-related constructs of nature. In the rocks of Nagoya, Kyoto, and Himeji an artificial and independent image of built nature is staged. By juxtaposing nature experience and spatial perception in an unusual way, Kay Fingerle mediates between the demarcation from the uncontrollable forces of nature through architecture and the necessary integration of nature into a hostile, because built environment. The work of built natures / gebaute Bilder von Natur Japan/ Germany 2016 deals with the relationship between built environments and nature, in places where autonomous images of build natures occur / uprise.
The writer and Japan expert Lafcadio Hearn describes a story from the Kojiki: The emperor Ōjin hits on the road to Osaka on a stone lying there, „on which this one ran away“ . The stone running away serves as a symbol, for example to understand the apparently inanimate rock as feeling and acting. The setting of the stones, which are understood as miniatures of animated islands or as symbols of animated beings, are the essential design element of Japanese garden art, especially in Japanese dry landscape gardens.
With the stone as an actor in nature and architecture, a special form of relationship to nature manifests itself: the photographs of the rocks show an artificially constructed nature that is simultaneously intended to create the appearance of a natural habitat.
Gebaute Bilder von Natur I Nagoya Stones I C -Prints I 50*75 cm I ©Kay Fingerle I Japan 2019
Gebaute Bilder von Natur I Kyoto Stones I C -Prints I 50*75 cm I ©Kay Fingerle I Japan 2019