Secret Skies, Shared Skies

In 1964 conceptual artist Yoko One produced a series of cards, each with a hole in the middle, and the caption, ‘A hole to see the sky through’. When you put the card to your eye and look at the sky, what has up till now been an unremarked background to your life is suddenly transformed into a work of art, what we might call a found landscape. The card provides a dynamic frame for parts of the sky, allowing you to focus momentarily on its blueness or its greyness, its cloudiness or its sunniness, its luminousness or its starriness. Ono’s ‘hole to see the sky through’ is a gift to the art lover. It allows everyone to experience the thrill of looking at the world through a frame, through a lens, through the eyes of an artist.

The sky is an image of infinity, of freedom, of connectedness. But everyone also has their own private sky. When we gaze out of our bedroom window in the morning, or look up from the computer screen to the view outside, we see a sky which is slightly different from everyone else’s. The window frame becomes a picture frame, giving shape, structure and limits to the endless sky.

The cruelest skies are the skies of captivity, glimpsed through a barred window. The happiest skies are the skies of anticipation, at dawn on a spring morning. The most magical skies are the skies of children, looking through the lens of a kaleidoscope for the first time. The most tantalising skies are the skies of travel, seen through the window of a speeding train. The most mysterious skies are the skies of a snowy night, neither black nor white. The saddest skies are the skies of displacement.

The migrant is consoled by the infinity of the sky, imagining friends and relatives looking at a similar sky on the other side of the world. But the migrant’s sky is also tinged with sadness at the almost intangible difference of the local sky. Each sky has its own quality of light, its own depth, its own horizon, its own cloudscape, its own starscape. Each sky is experienced with local sounds, smells, tastes and emotions.

How could anyone brought up under the moistness of a monsoonal sky imagine the dazzling brightness of an Australian summer sky? How to explain the haziness of a summer day, touched with the faint smell of a faraway bushfire? How to describe the silvery light bouncing off eucalyptus leaves? How to evoke the sound of a thunderclap, bringing relief from a searing summer’s heat with a gust of wind and a fall of rain?

When we take a photograph of our own private sky, it bears the traces of the sunlight that recently bathed us. When we send the photograph to our distant friends, it seems like they might, for a moment, be bathed in that sunlight, too. As they look at the photograph they might imagine themselves in our place, sharing our point of view, sharing our tastes, sounds and smells.

When the photograph is installed in the gallery, the window frame is overlaid with the picture frame. Gazing at the artist’s private sky, we can imagine ourselves in her place, gazing out the window, remembering the skies of Melbourne and Tokyo, hearing the sounds of memory, smelling eucalyptus but remembering pine trees, shivering on a hot summer’s day with the memories of a crisp winter sky.

The after-image of the sky in the gallery fuses with our own memories. Movement around the gallery triggers remembrance of other sites, other sounds, other smells, other light, other feelings.

We see the morning sky, the evening sky and the movement of tree branches in the wind. The oscillation of the trees provides depth and the illusion of the passing of time. The traces of those mornings and evenings are animated by the gallery lights. Our voices and thoughts in the gallery are part of the installation, fusing present and past, and reverberating into the future.

Utako Shindo’s oscillating landscape is a gift to the gallerygoer. She shares her own private sky and lets us link it with our own memories. She affirms the insight that ‘everyday experience can be a work of art’. The effect is like haiku poetry: ‘a comparison between the finite and the infinite which are brought together in the one experience’.

Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne, May 2008.

Oscillating Landscape explores sensations which can be experienced the same way in different places. Certain feelings – for instance, those associated with perception of light, wind, colour and sound through the observation of trees waving – can be similar in both Japan and Australia. The feelings may be those of longing for somewhere, or sometime far away. The stronger the longing gets, the closer our body feels to what is remote. In Oscillating Landscape, with images and sounds collected from multiple locations, I attempt to create a landscape that stimulates our memory and anticipation, which never stay still but oscillate in our minds.

Utako Shindo was born in Japan and is currently undertaking her Master of Fine Art at Melbourne University. Her practice incorporates installation and performance, exploring visual perception to suggest a tactile continuum between material and mind. She has recently exhibited at West Space, Conical, Kings ARI, and VCA gallery in Melbourne.