I check my diary of November 2017, when Hitomi and I were fellow residents at Kaapeli, the Cable Factory, for the period of one month. On day 8, I made the following diary entry: ‘My neighbour, the artist Hitomi Usui, and I go grocery shopping together. We’re hesitating between the small S market or the big K market. ‘It’s too big,’ we agree while entering S.’ There is another entry on day 27: ‘Hitomi goes out to the natural parks to photograph nature. On her Instagram she describes the color as ‘deep green’.’
Although we were neighbours at the residency, Hitomi and I saw each other only now and then. We were not there to make new friends. We came for solitude. A residency is a bit like the ‘radical write-in’ that the poet and art critic Eileen Myles organises: ‘Strictly for dreamy and private writing production, in the vicinity of other thinking and writing bodies. No show and tell. Bring writing materials to work on.’ A writer told me she attended the write-in in London and enjoyed the experience. There is something special about togetherness in concentrated creative activity.
I knew Hitomi was working with wood and went out visiting forests. So I guessed it must be her who I heard knocking, and that the knocking must be on wood. But when I asked, Hitomi told me this was not the case. When I saw her final work in the residents’ exhibition at HIAP, it turned out to be true that Hitomi doesn’t use nails or any other material that can be knocked into wood. Obviously, she uses tape. This one was the red and white tape that is used to fence off areas that are temporarily inaccessible. In her book, I read that there is a ‘Finnish Everman’s Right to freely access the country’s forest regularly as a part of their life’.
In Hitomi’s book, I see that she came back to Finland a year later. This time more North, to Lapland, as a resident of the Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort Residency from 2 June to 14 July 2018. Depicted in the book are photos of the Sámi ritual site on the island of Ukonsaari in Lake Inari. That year, 2018, also I came back to Finland, again in the month of November, and now, like Hitomi, I was on an island: Suomenlinna. Island life is a whole different thing. At Kaapeli I could, at moments, feel lonely, but on the island the nature makes me feel at one with life. I learn that the sea doesn’t separate or distance as one would expect. It connects.
‘where trees grow, where people come’ is the title of Hitomi Usui’s solo exhibition in 2019 at the Denchu Hirakushi House and Atelier in Tokyo. Hitomi has imagined the wooden Denchu House as a ‘forest’ in the shape of a home. I look at the exhibition photos in Hitomi’s book. A tablecloth made of Lycopodium clavatum spreads from a glass of water. A pine field finds itself on stage. Pressed samples of Jasminum polyanthus and Nandina domestica decorate the East and South facing curtains. There are tippets made of Chamaecyparis obtusa and Dicranopteris linearis. A brush of Pinus in a bucket with a stone leans against the wall. Prunus mume, shoji paper, shoji screen, and wood for the window. In the cupboard: rope, plant, balloon.
