When I first saw the Japanese monastic rock gardens, I felt a sense of fulfillment since I could relate the sea of pebbles spreading at my feet to my own artistic work which is based on a sea of dots on paper. I wanted to find a way to appropriate these rock gardens, to incorporate their dynamic into my own work. I also wanted to transubstantiate the flat dot on paper into a dot in three dimensions.
When I first saw the Japanese monastic rock gardens, I felt a sense of fulfillment since I could relate the sea of pebbles spreading at my feet to my own artistic work which is based on a sea of dots on paper. I wanted to find a way to appropriate these rock gardens, to incorporate their dynamic into my own work. I also wanted to transubstantiate the flat dot on paper into a dot in three dimensions.
There is, however, a basic difference between the actual rock gardens and my own visual language which has to do with the material itself. In the monastic rock gardens that we still encounter in Japan today, after centuries of philosophical meditation and zen practices, the usual features of a garden have been abstracted so as to leave a landscape of only pebbles and rocks, the most solid elements of nature. On the contrary, the medium I use is paper, a fragile material, an artificial manmade product. Where the former welcome rain and filter it to the earth, the latter would dissolve under the first raindrop. The ones are heavy and stable, the others light and sensitive. On the one hand, eastern zen philosophy; on the other, a western adaptation. An actual garden and a poetic metaphor. The challenge one faces is: how do all these elements fit together?
The remains of cotton-based paper that a paper-merchant would discard became the starting-point for my own garden. Whatever is rejected by consumer society forms the focus of my concern, with the aim of finding ways to reuse it. I take these pieces of paper, reduce them to a pulp, and then I mould them one by one, giving them the form of a pebble. These pebbles accumulate into a paper sea, thus creating my own version of a zen garden. The whole process, due to the long time required (another aspect of my work) alludes to prayer and, by analogy, to the ceremonies of zen monks.
The final result is presented as an installation of variable dimensions. My intention is to create an installation of approximately 30 m2, with the possibility of expanding it. The material I use has a dynamic character of its own; I chose to leave out the more massive rocks in order to bring out the basic material, the paper pebbles as elementary particles, which compose an overall picture that brings to mind the Daisen-in garden in Kyoto, Japan.
Nikos Papadopoulos
November 2011
