Mayumi Amada: “Kuon” (Eternal Flow of Time)
BY TAMATHA SOPINSKI PERLAMAN
A poem can deliver depth and beauty that disguise the labor and time that went into creating it. Words are carefully arranged for their impact and meter to explore the meaning, joy, and sorrow of human existence. Likewise, Mayumi Amada’s exhibition “Kuon:(Eternal Flow of Time)” embraces details, where beauty speaks in its simplest forms. Small flowers, the memory of a loved one, and the intricate patterns of a handmade object all connect the present to the past, and lead to the future, to the next generation. Amada includes both the material and the ephemeral; both lightness and darkness, to transform what some may take for granted into objects of uncomplicated beauty.
The infinite is in the finite of every instant.
—Zen proverb
Amada’s work is full of the dichotomies that inhabit everyday lives, transforming man-made, cast-off materials into glowing, weightless, natural forms. She prunes the recycled materials around her to create facsimiles of nature, suggesting a balance among natural and man-made elements. Kuon is a word in Japanese Buddhism that roughly translates to “eternal flow of time”.
When Amada was a child, her father reminded her not to waste the soy sauce she was generously applying to her breakfast, saying, “Everything is born with a purpose, but if it is not used fully, its life is wasted.” Amada took this message to heart and applied it to everything around her—animate and inanimate.
A flower falls even though we love it, and
a weed grows even though we do not.
—Dogen Zenji
For Amada, as for many people, the doily motif is a grandmotherly simbol. While doilies are connections to the familial past, they are also, in a sense, mile makers in the generational road. Amada began experimenting with the traditional crocheted doily as she explored these connections and what they meant to her. Amada’s mother and grandmothers used to give her scraps of fabric and yarn from their own projects, and taught her crocheting, sewing, the joy of floral arranging, and the value of the handmade object. Fabricating a string into an intricate pattern is meditative, she says. Like a lifetime, a simple string takes many twists and turns to form a unique pattern, while the string gets shorter and shorter. The finished product, however, has no beginning or end, but instead forms an endless pattern. In Remembering Grandmothers (2005), Amada crocheted floating rope into five doilies, ranging from four to nine feet across. In Japan, lanterns are sent out on a river at night to comfort the souls of the deceased. Here, by casting her doilies out in the Land of Lakes, Amada sends personal messages to her grandmothers.
Ours Is As Well (2008) is a billboard-size doily cut out of a plastic tarp. Its circular shape, pattern, and the sampler-style lettering are instantly recognizable, but the plastic and the message, “THE LIFE OF A FLOWER IS SHORT. OURS IS AS WELL.” takes it firmly out of grandmotherly territory. A Blip in Eternity (2010) is a seven-and-a-half-foot wide, thirteen-and-a-half-foot tall doily cut out of a plastic tarp suspended from the ceiling. Inside the decorative edges reads, “Our life on earth: a blip in eternity.” To a viewer with a Western religious background, the message may seem shockingly final. However, to Amada, raised in the Japanese Zen tradition, it is a comforting reminder to live the life one wants. She sees mortality not as something to fear, but as a practical matter to be taken into consideration. Time is rooted in these pieces, from their time-consuming process to their nod to the past and embrace of the future in their message and medium.
In Ukiyo-e, or “Floating World” prints of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Japanese printmakers showed how life is full of momentary pleasures. A Blip In Eternity uses the interplay of light and shadow to create a meditative space that calls to mind the light and dark in life. Amada’s words float and shimmer on the surface of the gallery floor, reinforcing the temporality of the message. Through her art making, Amada ponders how she wants to fulfill her life in the time she has. Perhaps we will, too.
There is nothing you can see that is not
a flower. There is nothing you can think
that is not the moon.
—Basho
When a woman begins her life tucked safely in her mother’s womb, within her grow the eggs that will one day be her children. In essence, the grandmother carries her grandchildren. The petals of each bouquet in Bouquets from Grandmas (2010) are made of plastic egg cartons. The egg holders carry future lives with them. Once they fulfill their purpose they are recycled and begin their lives anew as something else. “I respect all ancestors, especially maternal ancestors, because they gave us life,” Amada says. “Our ancestors are living in our bodies as repeatedly copied and used genes. I wanted to make this connection.” Attached to the wall in rose-like bunches, Bouquets from Grandmothers evokes a funerary quality. The cast shadows suggest the past and the possibility of a future life. The petals shiver as viewers pass, as if reacting to the energy of the present and the past colliding. Flowers are temporary, but these replicas are permanent.
Flower Field (2008) was inspired by a photograph of a vegetable nursery where tomatoes grew without soil. Amada uses the cut-off bottoms of water bottles to create her field of flowers. Blue LED lights emit a steady glow many find soothing. Blue is often considered a color of healing, as well as the color of the energy chakra in meditation. Some rsearch suggests blue LED lights may provide beneficial medical qualities. Flower Field brings together visions of future technology and images of organic life, in which the hum and glow of machinery, while soothing, lacks the organic messiness of soil and birth. This is a futuristic vision of reproduction, in which new life is a marridge of organic and scientific processes.
“In the eternal flow of time, we play but a minuscule part,” Amada says. “The way we choose to use that time, however, creates ripples through the generations ahead.”
Tamatha Sopinski Perlman is the MAEP associate.