Sunlight Penetrating Fruit

In 1972, Hashimoto left the graduate program of the metal hammering course at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music without taking a degree. In 1978, he began a series entitled Orchard: Sunlight Penetrating Fruit, Fruit in Sunlight Filtering through Leaves. At the Tsukuba International Environmental Art Symposium held in 1985, he attached his work to a tree for the first time and this proved the beginning of his sculptures which proliferate in correspondence to the surrounding plants. In 1995, he won The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama Prize at the Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture.

This is one of a series of works that Hashimoto has been producing since 1985 based on the idea of proliferating and growing in concert with the plants and trees in the surroundings just as plants grow by extending their vines and shooting out branches and leaves. It was acquired by the museum in 1996 and installed in the shrubbery in front of the restaurant. Through two later proliferative operations, it became more than double its original size and the form has changed significantly, too. It is amazing that a sculpture like this can be produced employing the metal hammering technique, in which metal is beaten and enlarged with a hammer and put into shape. The former shape is transformed or turned inside out, which helps in achieving a complex structure. If the weather is fine, move up close and take a look inside. You may be able to come across a lucky instant when the sun filtered through the branches of the trees pours into the big and small holes and produces a twinkling inner world like the interior of a womb.

(dimensions)
Sculpture made on the concept of ever growing with surroundings.