Tiffany Megumi Gerdes 海野恵

Massachusetts, USA

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How would you describe your work?

I create drawings I call ‘burn works’ using incense as well as prints and illuminated installations.

My work is informed by my experience in printmaking and photography as well as working in the design world from floral design to landscape architecture to currently textile design.

Themes that appear in my work: Quiet Illusions. Recording time. Mapping connection. Exploring shadow and light. Ephemerality. When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

What inspires you?

I’ve always been drawn to nature and landscapes from a representational perspective.

Increasingly however, I find myself expressing how nature and landscapes convey time and provide connection to the larger universe.

While training as a landscape architect, I was taught to view landscapes beyond the pastoral gaze. We were instead asked to engage with landscapes on a primary level studying and recording the infrastructure and life cycles that support the environment. Like how rain runs through the city after a storm, or how wind can create an economy of salt during a monsoon, how trees bend towards the light in a courtyard, or how soil is restored from industrial brownfield sites.

As a result, I often ask myself what is allowing the ‘green’ to grow? And how can I map or record it? It’s freed me to focus more on intimate observations and stories hidden within nature and landscapes. Additionally to convey how we are culturally, spiritually, and emotionally connected in some way or another to these life cycles.

Lately, I have also been incorporating language into my works. I was raised in a dual cultural setting in America and in Japan. The Japanese language specifically is pictorial. Many of the basic characters are visual representations of their meanings. For example, the kanji tree 木 or ‘ki’ is a singular representation of a tree. The kanji for grove features two trees, 林 and is read ‘hayashi’. To make a forest you would have three trees, 森 and is read ‘mori’. I’m starting to view this relationship with language as another kind of topography in my annotative mark-making, another layer of how I translate my connection with nature and landscapes.

Can you speak about your process?

Burning incense is an integral part of my process.

My grandfather passed away about 5 years ago. It was the first time I observed Japanese Buddhist funerary traditions. After a Zen Buddhist dies, they are sent on a 49 day journey into Meido, 冥土, the afterlife. As the soul departs into the darkness lit only by candlelight, hunger is satisfied by eating the smell of incense provided by the material world. This is one of the reasons why we are asked to burn incense during the ceremony.

When I first started to make burn works, I treated each mark as honoring a life cycle or a soul. Together the marks would create a network of souls waiting entry along the horizon of the Sanzu River 三途の川, the entrance to the afterlife.

Nowadays, I see it simply as a material expression of time or what I call mono no aware, 物の哀れ, the pathos of things.

How did you become interested in art?

I grew up speaking Japanese and English as if it were one language. As a result, I sometimes found barriers in connecting with my peers depending on which country or circumstance I was in.

I discovered non-verbal forms of communication like art and dance could act as a bridge between others. Traveling between two countries naturally heightens your observational skills and teaches you new ways of seeing, something I think is a crucial aspect of art-making.

Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books, or quotes?

I have many favorites, but here are some of the quotes I have in my sketchbooks:

“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” ― Emily Dickinson

“Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.” ― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.” — Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space; it was constantly being dotted, minutely, a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings; the universe was scrawled over on all sides, along all its dimensions.” ― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without the darkness, there would only be a blur… If you could add up the darkness you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

What advice do you have for younger artists?

Don’t be afraid to take your time. Don’t be beholden to superficial praise or financial success. Don’t worry if you’re not in a show yet or jumping from residency to residency. It’s okay. It’s more important to take the time to discover yourself in order to make work that is authentic to you and sustains you for life.

Any more thoughts about art, creativity, or anything else you would like to share?

I currently have some drawings on view at Gallery 263 as part of their Small Works Project in Cambridge, MA. The series is titled ‘Phainesthesia, Objects that Shine Forth’. You can read more about the work on the Gallery 263 page. If you’re in the area, swing by. It is one of the last few non-profit gallery spaces in the Boston area and what I consider a gem within the Cambridge community.

Additionally, I am working on a large-scale series of ‘burn works’ inspired by the Japanese dry garden, 枯山水, karensansui. They are works that build off of my previous large-scale work, ‘Distance is a State of Mind, the Mandala Series’. My goal for this work has been to deepen my drawing language by introducing folkloric elements hidden within these gardens but also to explore the sacred geometries used in karensansui. The dry garden specifically is an exercise in world-making from creating mountains out of energetic placement of rocks to recreating the flow of water using raked gravel formations. I’m interested in how these forms ultimately come together to create a transcendent landscape, one that lives within the mind.

Priscilla Derven

Donté K. Hayes