Piece concept (comment from the artist at the time of selection)

There is a myth about the sky and a snail in the Trobriand Islands. The sky boasts its size, but learns humility one day when it finds that the spiral shape of a snail's shell could expand as far as the eye can see if untwirled and even have the potential to cover the cosmos in time. We too tend to overestimate ourselves just like the sky in this myth. When I heard it, I remembered Nankichi Niimi's story, The Sorrow of a Snail, in which the sadness of a snail is packed inside of its shell. Even in life, people who have experienced sadness get an idea of their size as a receptacle for that sadness. I believe the spiral shape of the snail's shell symbolizes the size of our world and the sorrow of the people living in it. My piece is a work of sculpture taking the shape of a snail's shell. For it, I use discarded wastepaper and cloth from used clothing as materials. I do so as those materials can soak up and hold the great deal of sadness like the snail's shell in Nankichi Niimi's story. I want to create a sculpture piece to expand farther than the sky, transcending the billions of years of sadness etched into the spiral-shaped double helix of our DNA.

Piece introduction

This piece allows you to look to the sky from the inside of a spiral sculpture taking the shape of a snail's shell. It illustrates the size of our world and the sorrow of the people living in it with the snail's spiral shape—an idea that came to me from the myth of the Trobriand Islands.

Piece introduction video