Things that go to heaven and earth

While using Sleipnir, the eight-legged character that appears in Norse mythology as a starting point of inspiration, this work does not reproduce that myth, but rather depicts a new divine beast by superimposing it with memories and views of nature that live in Japanese land.

“Komagata,” which appears on mountain ridgelines since ancient times, has been deeply linked to people's lives as a natural calendar that tells the season of rice planting and sowing seeds. People read the changes of nature in the landscape and have inherited the seasons while feeling signs of invisible presence there.

Divine beasts and spiritual beasts are not real creatures, and they may be entities where such natural phenomena, memories of the land, and people's prayers have appeared as a single form.

The “thing that goes through heaven and earth” depicted in this work is a symbol of freely moving back and forth between earth and sky, reality and myth. That figure running through the night sky is not a boundary separating the world, and it quietly reconnects memories of different times, landscapes, and people.

Myths to me are not stories from the past. It is proof that the natural activities engraved on the land and the imagination created by humans in an attempt to understand the world continue to live while changing their shape even now.