It's incredibly difficult to be inspired before leaving for such a meaningless job, unsatisfying labor. My own practice is opposed to this excessive cultural force in every way.

I have something in mind, unclear and not completely formed, which is both an image of what to make and how to make it and the inspiration of maintaining its incomplete and imperfect qualities. Related to Japanese culture in this way: Reiku ceramics, Bonzai trees, Shinto temples, the darning of holes in textiles and clothing, but especially the hand formed crafting of small functional objects whose beauty arises through their use more than removed aesthetic contemplation. Objects for the hand to enjoy, objects for the body - as a whole not a dislocated eye, avoiding pure gaze, like the 15 stones of a rock garden with no designer, no maker, no definite age.

How to craft without practicing cultural appropriation? How to borrow the better attributes from a tradition without taking away from its own tradition, to use it as supplement towards filling in the cracks of my own existence and context with gold paste, to acknowledge the beauty in its imperfections?

Byōbu walls: wind walls. Made of paper yet designed to redirect the wind, to tremble against the aether without falling inward. Simple lightweight frames, lattice of bamboo, inspired by the mono-material of the forest, with no metal only bamboo nails so that the side can be shaved down and squared to the other edges. Layers of paper are built up over the frame with special paper hinges which allow flexibility in both direction. These walls are more book than architecture, more of a painting than structural support, for directing the mind as much as cloaking the body, protecting awareness and increasing the sensitivity of the senses - vision upon its surface, hearing within the room. They are ear drums, resonating with the vibrations of the rooms inherent frequencies, a sound trap collecting the aural auras of all those passing through the space. When painted with image, hanging calligraphic poems, or projections of shadows and light in the room the screen absorbs, bringing into itself, but when wrapped in thin foils of gold or silver or papered with patterns of the external world, of nature or civilization, straight lines or smooth curves, the thin membranes sing back out to the environment to reflect and refract the light upon other walls.

I want to build these walls for the studio in order to study how they might absorb and reflect my being, to form a space, as marker or monument or membraneous barrier, separating what flows and forces, reflecting what energies. I want to hand craft small object in order to better understand the sensitivity of their touch, to appreciate their scale and material and what they are able to pull out of me - or allow me to extract from myself - and to observe what the difference might be. I want to find stones and plants of such exquisite natural beauty that I don't want to attend to them beyond recognizing their own character, and give them a name, and build them a pedestal, and write them poetry that will allow me to see their own ancient relations even more clearly.