Living Chasm - Cockatoo Island

Fujiko Nakaya uses pure water-fog to create temporary and permanent site-specific fog installations. Her most recent works include Tales of Ugetsu (2008), a waterfall-like fog installation in the garden of Sankeien for the Yokohama Triennale, where wind sensors controlled the production of fog and lighting by responding to the presence of viewers; and Fog over Asuka breathes with ancient life (2011), where fog completely covered the oldest stone tomb in Japan.

In early 2012, Nakaya was working on a ‘Fog Tree’ in the Maldives, equatorial islands in the Indian Ocean that never see natural fog. For the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012), Nakaya used the outside cliff face on Cockatoo Island, parallel to the Turbine Hall, for her atmospheric mist work sculpted by the wind, Living Chasm – Cockatoo Island (2012), creating as it were an ecosystem and eventually entering the Turbine Hall to intermingle with the dry mist within the collaborative project by Craigie Horsfield, and Reinier Rietveld.

Artist Statement
I work with pure-water fog to create temporary and permanent site-specific fog installations. My first large-scale fog sculpture was commissioned by Experiments in Art and Technology for the Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. The first fog work shown in an art context was Earth Talk at the 2nd Biennale of Sydney in 1976. The work was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia, renamed Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere, and permanently installed in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden. Permanent works include Greenland Glacial Moraine Garden at the Museum of Snow and Ice in Kaga, Japan – a museum established in honor of her father, who was a snow and ice scientist. Other works include: Foggy Forest at the Showa Kinen Park near Tokyo; F.O.G. at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; and Moss Garden Nicey-sur-Aire, a Japanese garden in France made up of local plants and stones. I have made installation works with Shiro Takatani, and the media artists group doubleNegatives Architecture, including MU: Mercurial Unfolding, in which real time data on wind was fed to the fog controls at I’institut Franco-Japonais in Tokyo; and Cloud Forest with Shiro Takatani at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.