Exhibitions > Geologic Intimacy (Yu no Hana), 2016 Fujiya Gallery Hanayamomo Beppu, Japan

A Love Letter to Beppu

The story of how I came to Beppu began a long time ago, almost half of my life ago, in New York when I was walking down the street downtown across from Cooper Union near the now unrecognizable Bowery. There was a man selling old books on the sidewalk, laid out on a sheet. One caught my attention, a book called Volcano about volcanoes from around the world. There were volcanoes from Iceland, Hawaii, Italy, Scotland. In retrospect, every project I have ever undertaken can be traced to a picture in this book, but that is a story for another time. It was here, in the book, that I saw Beppu for the first time.

Photographs of children cooking eggs on the streets, steam coming through every crack in the sidewalk and a pool as red as blood found their way into my understanding of what another type of city could be. In New York steam vents erupted at every corner, but these were industrial rather than natural. No matter, I imagined a correlation between my home city and this city of steam. For almost 20 years, I dreamt about Beppu. Beppu is the second largest geothermal center on earth, second only to Yellowstone. 

It smells different, down by the sea, different light. So many tsunami warning signs up and down the seafront, and a map of an underwater tsunami deterrent system demonstrating hidden protection.

IF YOU FEEL AN EARTHQUAKE GO TO
HIGHER GROUND IMMEDIATELY –

A picture of a large wave, a line at a 45 degree angle, the symbol of a person running up a hill. Distant cities, another skyline. I eat what comes out of the bay, food cooked by the steam of the onsen, I soak my body in the same water and become more mineral each day, more animal of the saline sea and ever productive waters. What does it mean to see something that you have wanted to see for half of your whole life? I have wanted to see Bloody Pond Hell for 19 years. I have looked at pictures of the pool every year since I was 21. And now I am here. I am 40. Today it is not red but more of the color of rust, pink gossamer with steam.

I am used to extinct volcanoes. In Scotland, hills are volcanic plugs and craters. Former lava flows pave the streets. Island chains erupt, only in silhouette, out of the water. Aso-San, the largest active caldera on earth, is not far from Beppu – only a few hours by train, then bus to the foot of the volcano. The day I go, I am informed at the train station that access to the volcano is shut, poisonous gas and wind going in the wrong direction. Two sides of a volcanic coin – one extinct, one entirely alive. You can be ready to meet the volcano, it doesn’t mean the volcano is prepared to meet you. I go anyway, stay at a distance. Watch.  Smoke billows in one long continuous stream. Then, the road to the volcano is opened. The weather has shifted, the air is clear. You will not choke, you can ascend to the crater. You can get a bus up to the top or walk. I walk. I want to walk, I want to meet this volcano from the soles of my feet up. Past vast boulders of tumbled rock, craters so huge they look like valleys, volcano evacuation huts made of cement walls three feet thick, like a fortress, but for protection against this very temperamental mountain. I walk. The smoke continues without pause, a constant companion. Evacuation huts are at regular intervals now, and at the crater, trembling. The sound fills every part of you. Louder than an earthquake, but equally as startling. Herman Horst would not have far to go into this caldera. Or Empedocles. The walls are almost vertical into the mouth of the crater, and so deep you lose a sense of scale. I stay as long as I can manage to be this close to the other side of the volcanic coin, so active, you almost feel extinct. 

H. tells me she asked a geologist friend what type of house she should live in, in Kannawa in Beppu, old or new. He laughed and said it doesn’t matter what type of house you live in. Kannawa is a floating landmass above a sea of faults. Bloody Pond Hell is not an accident.

You are sleeping on a volcano.
Sleeping in the epicenter.
Sleeping on top of Yellowstone.

In Beppu, I realize my actual desire is to meet the photographs from my volcano book, one by one. A totally particular desire, not even to make new, but to trace the exact location that every photograph was taken, stand in each place and look out at the view that I had witnessed for two decades of my life, only in my mind. I step into memories that aren’t quite mine, that have filled my consciousness for 20 years, that I have looked at when I need a reminder of something much wider. And here I am at Bloody Pond Hell, with the skyline of steam, soaking in blue milk waters. 

When I get home, I take out my volcano book. Staffa is there, Heimaey, Big Island, Stromboli – all the places I have gone to meet volcanoes, to understand what it means to be human and rock and both at the same time. I check the index of Volcano and discover, though I have read and looked at this book one million times before, that it is by William Melson, the volcanologist who recorded the sounds of Arenal erupting for over 40 years. 40 years, longer than most marriages. It was at The Center for Short Lived Phenomena many years ago that William Melson explained the nature of love to me, when talking about volcanoes. He said –

You love what you get to know, what you pay attention to and therefore become more aware of. This is not a passive form of love. This is how I feel about Arenal. This is how I feel about Beppu.

James Hutton
(parent material)

At the National Soils Archive in Aberdeen they gave me a gift, a core sample of earth from James Hutton’s farm where he worked and thought about deep time….literally some of the same red earth he watched travel down a stream and thought – the earth must be very, very old. The rocks and minerals in Geologic Intimacy (Yu no Hana), formed in 18 days; over one year; in 3 years; over 10 years. I am 43 years old, my mother is 77. The soil from James Hutton’s farm is composed of Devonian Old Red Sandstone approximately 370 million years old.

Ultimately, rocks were the first immigrants – travelling across the surface of the earth throughout deep time to meet and form new geologies. In a micro context, we brought Scottish sandstone and Japanese mineral life together, to form new geological conglomerates – sculptures composed of minerals and rocks originally from one side of the earth and the other. I am from New York on the North American Tectonic Plate, Naoko is from Fukuoka in the middle of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Here in Scotland, on the Eurasian Tectonic plate, we are assembling a new geological family tree.

Ilana Halperin. April 2017

With thanks to Naoko Mabon; Creative Scotland; Aberdeen City Council; Peacock Visual Arts; NPO BEPPU PROJECT; The Elephant Trust; Fujiya Gallery Hanayamomo; Hyotan Onsen; Ryokan Mikasaya; Hotel Fugetsu HAMMOND; Yanagiya; Sunahara Onsen; Bloody Pond Hell; Matsuo Washi Studio; The James Hutton Institute; Marianne Bevand; Kenji Kono (Kokochi Cafe Musubino); Yasuka Tachibana (NPO BEPPU PROJECT); Misuzu Goto (Irifune-so Ryokan); Dr Allan Lilly (The James Hutton Institute); Michael Waight (Peacock Visual Arts); Richard West (LightlyWest); Hiromi Yamashita and Dr Leslie Mabon.

Installation images: Sachiyo Ando