Awareness of between-ness: immaterial and material, Katami, once a possession of the deceased

My obsession with 'between-ness' started whilst taking photographs as a professional photographer. I explored the space between a subject and the camera as an energy flow. This energy flow with the subject (organic or non organic) and the space it occupied created in my photographs a more visually interesting outcome. The obsession emerged as a topic that would drive my current research into what this 'between-ness' is, and how to visualise it. ‘Between-ness’ is an 'invisible' subject to explore, and the existence of 'between-ness' requires 'things' that inhabit the between, and without these 'things' there will be no ‘between'. Because I have been living in Australia for nearly half of my life leaving all my family and relatives back in Japan, I have not been able to attend funerals of my relatives and friends. Having missed the communal sharing to honour and to appreciate the life of the deceased, I chose Katami as the material object of this research, which is an object that was once a possession of the deceased, kept as a memento or remembrance of dead in Japanese culture. Katami represented the visualisation of the ‘between-ness’: an energy flow and interconnectedness between the deceased and the living. ‘Between-ness’ is explained by the Japanese aesthetic called “ma” which is translated as a gap, or a time and space between. This empty space/time is significant in Japanese aesthetics. The unique expression and visualisation of ‘between-ness’ is individualised, but to draw attention by being aware of ‘between-ness’ realises the honour of a deceased person’s life. What they are still teaching us – is it an understanding of the self? My two parallel worlds of death and life of the deceased are merged into one through this process of visualising ‘between-ness’. The exploration of Katami, as the immateriality and materiality of between-ness was brought together in my photographic practice. The coalescence of the ‘between-ness’ onto one surface created a compression of the physical space. ‘Between-ness’ of the Katami (the material) and our perception (immaterial) lay in between space and time.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Watanabe, Miho

• Photography
• Between-ness
• Ma
• Painting
• Installation
• Visible invisible
• between immaterial and material
• Katami

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/18480

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/55042