Life clock

In Shinto belief, death is regarded as a form of impurity. After attending a funeral, one sprinkles salt over their body before re-entering the home, to cleanse away the defilement. The use of salt traces back to its ancient role as a preservative for corpses and to a passage in the Kojiki, where the deity Izanagi no Mikoto purified himself with seawater after fleeing the underworld.

The sea itself can be seen as a primordial soup in which life and death mingle. By bringing seawater ashore, exposing it to sunlight and the passage of time, and refining it into natural salt, we isolate a substance then placed inside an hourglass.

When you flip an hourglass, the time that just flowed appears to be erased. The notion of time as a strict, unchanging measure is overturned with a single gesture. Life and death may be no different. Like the seamless shift from June’s final day to July’s first, both states overlap for a while, gently transitioning. Even when a change seems complete, the essence remains the same.

In this work, the hourglass is opened so that you may take a portion of salt into your hand and eat it. Not to banish or cleanse away death, but to nourish the body that must go on living. Even when it becomes part of you, the salt undergoes no real transformation; it still cascades from top to bottom. You might feel as though you have escaped, yet from the start, this place, too, has always been the land of the dead.