Notes by Mayumi Hirano for As I lift one stone

Blanc Gallery – November 2024

Notes on Inbetweenness

Jel once told me that her artwork has become portable since she started to live between Manila and Bacolod. The wooden components in the Readings (As I Lift One Stone) series accompanied her on the trip she had to make rather suddenly, with a sense of disquietude. They are varied in shape, but all are so small, round, and light that can be held tight in her hand, like an amulet —a vessel of prayers for protection.

The sense of touch is our first contact with the world around us. While things appear still blurred, we are born with an acute reflex, which prompts us to grip anything that stimulates our palms. Soon we start reaching out intentionally to grasp things around us – anything that attracts our curiosity. Touching and gripping is our primary mode of discovering the new environment and our own body, as well as an early form of social interaction that fosters communication and bonding with caregivers.

The found ink-brush drawing and calligraphy incorporated in Jel’s artworks have also traveled from a distant time and space. By the time they arrived in Jel’s hands, they had lost their ties with their original environment. Freed from the gravity of meanings, they open up new opportunities for unmediated and intuitive interactions. With Jel’s curious snips, the symbols start to feather in the air, turn upside down, break up into lines and shapes, and gently land on wooden pieces.

Being emptied with meanings, the wooden pieces conjure the imagination of the world we might have seen as a baby before developing representational understanding. It is a strange, abstract world where we try to make sense of things without conceptual thinking. The exploration is done by using hands, by interacting with the fragments of the world, trying out various configurations and relationships. The pieces never settle in one arrangement. There is always an unbridgeable gap in between.

In this emptiness between the things, we come in direct contact with the world beyond representation. Jel’s artwork is a meditative invitation to leave behind our languaged mind and to regain a sense of unmediated bonding with reality –that is fundamentally impermanent, imperfect and inseparable from ourselves.

Mayumi Hirano