Art

Whether lying in an empty landscape or a street full of traffic, the capsule looks out of place: resting on the desert sands of Egypt, the gleaming pod looks as if it has just beamed in from another time frame; and on the beach in Dubai, it looks as if it is waiting for the rising tide to float it out to sea.

The choice of locations, ancient and modern, indicates that time and our understanding of it is the subject of ‘Beginning of the End: Past, Present, Future’, a work that has taken 11 years to complete. The photographs are shown inside the drum of three circular structures so as to suggest a continuum. The capsule is surprisingly small, but then, Mariko Mori is extremely petite. Feature continues

It depends on the conditions; I feel the energy and vibrations of a place. In Shanghai I spent over an hour, but in Angkor Wat it was too hot to stay that long.

The capsule is a metaphor for time travel. Is this something you have experienced?

Yes. Going to different cities and being exposed to different cultures and meeting different people was a learning practice.

But was it a metaphysical as well as physical journey?

Yes of course. I wanted to understand different concepts of time. According to Western physicists, the universe started with the Big Bang, but Eastern concepts of time are different; there is no beginning and no end.

You describe the series as a homage to your father, a way of coming to terms with his death

Dubai was the last place I performed; it was the end of the series and I chose that location because the sea is significant in terms of birth and death. ‘Tom na h-iu’ can also be seen as a monument to her father’s memory. Named after Tom na h-iubhraich, a mythical realm that the ancient Celts believed was home to spirits awaiting rebirth, her glass monolith is illuminated from within by LED lights that glow pink, yellow, green and blue. They are linked by the internet to a computer at the Kamioka Observatory, a cosmic ray research station at the University of Tokyo which monitors elementary particles known as neutrinos. These are made in the centre of the sun, in the earth’s atmosphere and during a supernova – the explosive death of a star – and the changing light patterns record their presence.

How would you describe ‘Tom na h-iu’?

‘The sculpture is a standing stone for our time, a symbol of rebirth. Death is the beginning of everything. When a star dies it creates a new life since the heavy atoms produced by a supernova are primal, low-energy particles that are essential for life; they are present in water, earth and in our bodies. I’m not religious, but Buddhism and Shintoism are part of my cultural background, and Buddhists believe in transfiguration – reaching a deeper level of consciousness, transcending the self.’