shashasha

“The warmth of the hands on the back
The gaze that protects you from afar
A friend’s words that always give you strength
Things that can only be conveyed in a low voice
What is a book?
A vessel to carry
what flows from human activities”

Opening Mika Horie’s photobook “Trees, Water And Light” means being transported into a different world and time. With their enchanting shades of blue and the thick, irregular textures, the photographs of natural and rural landscapes and details unfold a certain slowing magic, not unlike the sensation of watching waves crash on the beach or clouds drift across the sky.

Mika Horie, who lives in an old farmhouse in the mountains of Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture, follows a principled and time-consuming artistic process. She creates her own photographic paper from gampi branches and prints her photographs using ferric ammonium citrate, potassium ferricyanide and the power of the sun in an early 19th century method called cyanotype. Each print being unique through the faults of the paper and the slight flaws introduced by the cyanotype process, Horie’s artistic practice fully engages the wabi-sabi ideals of finding beauty in imperfection and modesty.

“Blue has the effect of escaping from time and material possessions that float through past, present and future. I believe this is the only colour that allows you to escape from yourself and enter your world of poetry and the memories deep down in your hear.”
― from Mika Horie’s afterword (included in Japanese and in English translation)

The unique design of the book, incorporating hand-made prints of Mika Horie’s photographs, means that each issue of the book will be a one-of-a-kind copy.