Kurumi Ono

Kurumi Ono is an artist based in Tokyo and Tochigi, Japan. She has graduated from BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London in 2019.

‘Everything flows’ (Old Greek“Panta Rhei” ).
As the philosopher Heraclitus said, it seems to me that everything in this world is constantly changing. All living things will eventually return to soil, and everything that has form will crumble and disappear. However, humanity has always had the desire to resist this transmutation, to keep something forever. I started working with the interest in such flux and the human thirst for preservation.

I am attempting to visualise the relationship between change and preservation by burying photographs that are created by pressing the shutter button to hold the moment of an event in the soil, which is in constant flux.
The photographs are decomposed and reshaped by absorbing moisture and moving micro- organisms in the soil. Photographs, that are supposed to capture a scene of the changing world, are transformed on paper.

Burying photographs in the soil looks like the opposite act of yearning for preservation. However, vulnerability and fragility, that humanity has strongly wished to preserve, emerge.

Through my work, I would like to demonstrate how we should respond to the ever-changing organisms and materials.