Visionaries Kyocera Museum

Visionaries: Making Another Perspective
Curator: Noriko Kawakami

“Tamura Nao uses the word “interconnections” to indicate the importance of having points of contact between different things, and of maintaining their relationships while keeping them in balance. Tamura has been based in New York since leaving her birth country of Japan at the age of 19, and says that this is something she realized for herself through her own experiences.

To keep the balance between mutual interactions it is not enough to accept the surrounding environment and other people; acts that generate ideas are also essential. “My works always start from multiple questions,” says Tamura. The light fittings that she designed in sympathy with the ideas of a company that felt an immediate need to tell the world about the manual techniques used to create Venetian glass are also of a piece with her argument.>>

>>Precisely because we live in an era of constant change, in her designs she incorporates the idea of the importance of slowing down and valuing the time for in-depth thinking while making things, and in the development process, she became involved in dialog not only with artisans working in glass but also with the material itself.

The installation that uses this product creates the sense of quietly facing a Venetian canal. It refreshes our awareness of the reality that the landscape in front of us is the world with which each of us is individually engaged. “A designer’s work is to make opportunities to think. I want to seek out paths on which we can walk in a brighter direction, toward the light” says Tamura. She continues posing questions that explore the future.”

The installation brought FLOW[T] to Kyoto—Venice at dusk, ten years on. It is part of The Moment Series (2013–ongoing), an exploration of time through water and glass.

Glass is a living material. It breaks if you resist its natural flow. The work emerges through dialogue—between material, maker, and time. Through these works, I hope people pause, even briefly, to feel the moment around them.

All works are created with Venetian glassblowers surrounded by the changing reflections of water.

Glass is a living material. It breaks if you resist its natural flow. The work emerges through dialogue — between material, maker, and time.

Through these works, I hope people pause, even briefly, to feel the moment around them.