I am a Japanese artist and 2007-2008 resident of Border Arts Residency in La Union. N.M. BAR accepts one artist to stay 10 months per year. Although I had several residency experiences in East America, this is my first time in Texas and New Mexico.

As soon as I started the residency, I sensed that the BAR director, Mr. Ray Parish and his wife, Becky Hendrick, love this place and are giving lots of effort to manage it. The residency facility is on the second floor and consists of a living room and studio, which are big enough for one person to live in. It is sunlit and provides a pleasant environment. From the balcony, I enjoy the views of a peach garden, the Mesa horizon sunset and the stars at night. I can say that these are various gifts for any resident.

In the beginning, since I had no idea what was going to happen with my residency, I thought I would be spending most of my time alone doing my work at the BAR studio. Instead, thanks to Mr. Parish, I was offered a job at the University of Texas at El Paso as a visiting artist. From there, my life became a balance of frequently spent weekdays creating steel sculptures at UTEP and creating lots of drawings, developing new ideas for future works, at the BAR studio.

The 50-minute drive from BAR, La Union to UTEP, is time to enjoy the characteristics of the El Paso area. The pastoral scenes of the farms, cotton fields, pecan trees, plants that grow robustly in the red dried soil; the mountains that face Mesa, contrails drawn in the huge sky, well-organized gardens in the high-class residential areas, the inner state highway, which is surely jammed at the Sunland Park Dr. exit, the factory zone and ASARCO chimney, Juarez which can be seen through the border fences, etc. I really enjoy this drive; it inspires me for my work.

My day at sculpture shop, at UTEP, started off with some chat between the faculty and students. All are friendly very good people. The difficult thing for me was that I could not follow their conversation when they spoke Spanglish and used slang. I had no idea when it was time to laugh at their jokes.

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Now, I would like to talk a little bit about my work. The theme for my work is about expressing metaphor of life through the changing phenomenon in things and scenes. I am also pursuing the meaning of my physical efforts for the material. Basically, I prefer to use industrial materials such as steel, rubber, concrete, plastic, etc. which helps my body of work lead to the objective viewpoint.

During the BAR, I was able to developed three projects. My first approach started with making outside sculptures for the group show, “Art on the Green Sculpture Invitational” at Kemp Center for the Arts in Wichita Falls. I focused on expressing energy of the ground in El Paso, by rhythmically placing rock shapes in circle units with forged steel rods. I am glad to have completed this piece by simply developing the quality that is my forge.

I encouraged myself to apply for the Art and Sol Project by the City of El Paso Museum and Cultural Affairs Department, and was successfully selected to be one of artists for December 2007. I was planning to express my sense for El Paso’s unique climate using more steel sheets instead of just steel rods. Although the contract was cancelled, due to my visa situation, I hope to obtain the opportunity to contribute to El Paso’s Art scene in the future.

As far as my BAR goes, I recently finished installing works for my exhibition at oLo Gallery in Downtown El Paso, which is scheduled from March 18 to April 19, 2008. For this and the Wichita Falls Group exhibits, I am showing table-sized stone sculptures made of steel, drawings on steel sheets, and interactive works with steels, magnets, and papers. In many of these works I am strongly conscious of the steel surface respiration as a metaphor of the life activities on earth.

I am very grateful that I could work on pieces and explore my ideas more than I was expecting. Also, sharing time with students and faculty at UTEP gave me a lot of good energy and inspiration. I still have some time left to keep working here until I go back to Japan at the end of May. Hopefully I will learn and enjoy more about various scenes in the El Paso area and make more work.