SPATIAL GESTURES
INTERVIEW
The wearable objects Yuta Ishihara makes under the moniker Shihara play tricks on us. “The hardware is in focus, incorporated into the design itself,” says Ishihara. His work is clean and minimal, as much about what is there as what is not, though with layers of meaning hiding beneath the surface. This sense of wonder, even magic, may have been sparked in his childhood, as he grew up in a flower farming family living at the foot of Mount Fuji, in Yamanashi. Here, he could occasionally dig up pottery and handmade objects more than 3,000 years old, remains from the Jōmon people who roamed the land around that time. “The artefacts I found in my hometown made me seriously think about the endurance and longevity of things at a young age. What lasts and what does not. That has deeply affected the way I work. Jewellery is personal, something we give to ourselves or people close to us. It amasses a story, and should be something to pass on, something that transcends our lifetime.”
Read the full interview in Ark Journal Vol. XIV.
WORDS Alisa Larsen
PHOTOGRAPHY Noam Levinger
BETWEEN MEMORY AND MATTER
In Tashkent, a 1912 diesel station has been transformed by Studio KO into Uzbekistan’s first permanent centre for contemporary art — a place where history, material and contemporary culture meet.
MARFA MANIFESTATION: Donald Judd’s Marfa buildings restored through measured restraint
In the small town of Marfa, Texas, the Judd Foundation cares for 22 buildings acquired by Donald Judd and, since his death in 1994, has preserved them according to his artistic and architectural thinking.
MARAZZI, SHAPING INNOVATION THROUGH CERAMIC CRAFT
In the language of surfaces, few materials carry both memory and modernity as effortlessly as ceramic. For Marazzi, this duality has long defined its approach, an enduring dialogue between industrial precision and the human hand, between innovation and heritage.
SPATIAL GESTURES
INTERVIEW
The wearable objects Yuta Ishihara makes under the moniker Shihara play tricks on us. “The hardware is in focus, incorporated into the design itself,” says Ishihara. His work is clean and minimal, as much about what is there as what is not, though with layers of meaning hiding beneath the surface. This sense of wonder, even magic, may have been sparked in his childhood, as he grew up in a flower farming family living at the foot of Mount Fuji, in Yamanashi. Here, he could occasionally dig up pottery and handmade objects more than 3,000 years old, remains from the Jōmon people who roamed the land around that time. “The artefacts I found in my hometown made me seriously think about the endurance and longevity of things at a young age. What lasts and what does not. That has deeply affected the way I work. Jewellery is personal, something we give to ourselves or people close to us. It amasses a story, and should be something to pass on, something that transcends our lifetime.”
Read the full interview in Ark Journal Vol. XIV.
WORDS Alisa Larsen
PHOTOGRAPHY Noam Levinger