Gathering the Distance — Solo Exhibition

At three thousand meters above sea level, the volcanic landscape of Mount Etna stretches endlessly in shades of grey — a disorienting vastness that makes one lose all sense of place, as if standing at the edge of the world. Gazing into a barely breathing crater, one cannot help but wonder where it leads, how deep it goes, and from which other opening it might eventually emerge. The volcano's inapproachability has always invited layers of imagination, and the unreachable only deepens the fantasy of an otherworldly space.

In his 1664 publication Mundus Subterraneus, Athanasius Kircher illustrated his vision of the earth's interior — each volcanic crater harboring its own flame, all connected beneath the surface. French author Jules Verne, in his 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, likewise used a volcano as an entry point, imagining a passage through the earth's core. In June 2024, I traveled to Mount Etna in Sicily, Italy, and then set out across the Aeolian Islands in search of further volcanic traces. It was during this journey that I discovered, unexpectedly, that I was standing in the very place Verne had imagined as the exit point in his novel.

Another Entrance is an installation that merges image and sound, seeking to reconstruct the bodily memory of climbing a volcano in Italy. In front of the screen, an angled wooden structure is placed for viewers to sit or lie upon. The footage moves slowly from a distant view of the volcano toward a single stone, then closer still — into the cracks and textures of its surface — shifting between the scale of a telescope and a microscope, traversing the landscape at once in its vastness and its intimacy.

When large quantities of pumice gather on the ocean's surface, the formation is known as a "pumice raft" — capable of growing large enough to appear as a small island in satellite imagery, drifting gradually along ocean currents. Like floating islands at sea, pumice rafts shift in size and carry life within them. In recent years, the restlessness of underwater volcanoes has given birth to several new islands on earth — yet under the force of waves and wind, they scatter and disperse across the ocean.

Drawing on this idea of restless, elusive movement, the work takes pumice — once part of a newly formed island — as its primary material, remaking it into glass floating spheres. These spheres become the subjects of the film. On screen, pushed and pulled by the motion of the waves, the spheres continuously change their formation on the surface of the sea.

The work draws its inspiration from the pumice island formed by the underwater eruption of Japan's Fukutoku-Okanoba volcano. Taking as its starting point the imagination of having picked up a fragment of another country's territory, the artist researched the composition of pumice and discovered that it contains a high proportion of silica glass — a material closely related to ceramic glaze and the glassmaking process. By working with pumice as a primary material to produce tiles and glass floating spheres, and presenting them through video installation, the work navigates the distance between technological mediation and physical reality.

The tiles on the floor function as units measuring the scale of land, like puzzle pieces or tectonic plates scattered across the ground. Inside the glass spheres, the colors and textures are those of pumice after it has been crushed and fired at high temperatures — floating and shifting like buoys on the sea, like small coordinates adrift.