I am Yamamoto Akane, a kirikane glass artist.
Kirikane is a decorative technique
employing gold foil cut into thin strips
or miniature triangular or square pieces to create a design pattern.
Originally the technique was used for Buddhist paintings and statues.
It is a traditional kōgei craft technique unique to Kyoto in Japan.
I was born in Kanazawa and so I was quite familiar with
kōgei crafts decorated with gold leaf.
To me, it was splendid and bold, since kinpaku kōgei has its roots
in samurai culture which flourished under
the powerful Maeda family of the Kaga domain
I thought kinpaku kōgei was gorgeous and luxurious.
I realised kirikane,
although using the same gold leaf, is quite delicate and elegant.
I was deeply attracted to kirikane.
This area of crafts is known in Japanese as kōgei and is highly respected,
has a lot of attention and foregrounding in exhibitions,
in museums and department stores and pieces by these artists are sought after
and command high prices.
The traditional materials are largely ceramics, lacquer, bamboo, textiles.
But there have been new areas developed, particularly in the last 50 or 60 years,
and glass is one of these.
Glass had been made in Japan for utilitarian purposes,
but was not regarded as part of a craft tradition, as part of the kōgei area.
And artists have been developing this in recent years and doing exciting
and innovative things.
Yamamoto is particularly interesting because she develops
glass as an artistic medium, but incorporates traditional techniques,
traditional craft practices.
She encases these incredibly finely cut,
delicately prepared strips of metal leaf
between layers of glass,
and then they create this sparkling effect from within the sculpture.
I did not want to use kirikane as ornament,
I wanted to use it to express my interior vision.
If it can be lifted from the surface and float in space
kirikane can be the centre of attention.
However, kirikane uses gold leaf
which is cut into extremely fine strips.
It was technically impossible to float kirikane designs in space.
I then came to have an idea to sandwich it with transparent material,
that would result in the same effect. That's why I tried glass.
The end result is this beautiful leaf boat.
It's a technique that, when it's embedded in glass,
has only been done successfully in the modern era by Yamamoto Akane.
So this piece is really a unique work.
So, what we see here is the beautiful cut gold,
but we see it mitigated and almost funnelled through the glass
and through the layering of color.
In a way, what she's doing is a collaboration with material.
She's doing a collaboration with fire.
She's doing a collaboration with earth.
She's doing a collaboration with metal.
She's doing a collaboration with air.
She's doing a collaboration with water.
So in a way, she's using all five elements here
to create this work.
It is Kyoto culture.
It is not in your face.
It is soft. It is gentle.
You have to look to see. And there's hidden meaning.
The Leaf Boat came from a childhood memory
that when it rained, water flooded into drains.
I floated a leaf on the stream and followed it running,
wondering how far it would go. I used to enjoy playing in this way.
I liked it because even though I was a small child
I knew that water running
in the drain will meet the ocean.
I thought to myself that this leaf might make it all the way to the ocean.
I was identifying with the leaf,
I liked this game very much
and looked forward to the rain.
This memory stayed in my mind
and resulted in the Leaf Boat.
What she's doing is doing an ultimate practice of devotion, here.
She has to, in a way, remove the noise from her life, from her work.
So she decided to move outside to the outskirts of Kyoto
to a beautiful rural place.
My studio is surrounded by nature.
This abundant nature around me,
as well as the fact that I live in Kyoto,
the literature and the classics,
I get inspiration from all the elements.
ideas enter my head one after another and I create my work following these ideas.
Japan has four distinctive seasons.
In particular living in a place surrounded with mountains like here,
day by day, you see tree leaves change colours.
The leaves are fresh light green in May but with the summer approaching,
they turn into a deep green.
Then, without warning, the autumn leaves turn red and yellow and start to fall.
The shifting of the seasons is truly beautiful and moves me quite deeply.
Although it is the same Leaf Boat, the leaves I floated in my childhood
sported different colours according to the seasons.
So, I wanted to create the Leaf Boat representing the three seasons
spring, summer and autumn.
The British Museum owns the summer version,
the base of which is green glass
with the addition of blue glass to give more of a feeling of depth.
It's taking from the winter and bursting through welcoming in the summer.
We have the clean colors here and then the cool colors of the green
and blue and then the clear glass coming on the top.
So it's fresh.
It's about the colors that are starting to come out that
we will soon see in summer.
What she does to create this,
She creates the cut gold that we see placed here herself.
That in itself is rare.
What she does to prepare it, is she takes this gold, beautiful,
high quality gold foil, and she has to heat it in a very specific way.
Then she layers them on top of each other and they have to fit perfectly.
She cuts them using bamboo
and these very, very, very thin cuts.
The lines are actually like a hair,
the width of a hair 3 millimeters long.
And she places them down on the glass and then sandwiches it
with other glass and fires it.
You need to minutely control the kiln temperature depending on colour,
shape and size of the glass you use.
Since this is the new technique, I needed to start from scratch,
collecting data from experiment after experiment to complete a single work.
The success rate was quite low.
I felt very much like a scientist, always repeating my experiments.
It is like my body is split in half,
one half of me is an artist,
and the other is a material scientist and I am split between them.
I often fail the first time. When I see a messed-up work,
after I put so much time and effort into it,
there could be many air bubbles in the work.
All the months of effort focused on creating a work
can be washed away in one kiln firing.
in one action of firing in a kiln,
This happens repeatedly. And has a considerable psychological impact on me
At first I become rather dejected.
But after a day I start to ask myself, why did this work fail?
What could I do to make it better next time? And my interest is piqued, and I become excited.
Whenever I fail, I always come back to Edison's phrase.
Edison failed 10,000 times before finally inventing electric bulbs.
When he failed he said that he did not fail
but rather found the way which did not work.
Akane sensei is a perfectionist
and if the work does not resonate with her
or if the work is not perfect.
It's not sold...
it's put away and it never sees the light of day again.
So these works are incredibly rare.
We have examples of this cut leaf technique in the collection
of Buddhist paintings and sculptures,
and this shows how we can demonstrate
the continuities across the collection, how ancient practices very often
have been used for centuries and are being adapted
and updated by contemporary artists.
We will be developing the collections of contemporary crafts
from Japan in British Museum's collection in the coming years.
We have rotations of the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries every six months,
so I encourage you to come and see the latest acquisitions,
the newest displays
including Yamamoto Akane's beautiful glass sculpture, Leaf Boat.
I am very pleased that my work is in the British Museum collection.