toshiaki tomita

There’s spring in you, Tomita-San, and there’s something like a spring in the middle of it… I can imagine the spring, and the water of the spring is so blue.

Once she said……
There is a spring in myself
I was really surprised……
I had not mentioned anything before.
The dent we find on the earth
Surely, surely tells us where the hidden water is
Not that the dent kept the water in it
The hidden water carved herself on the earth.
If we do not have to tell something important
If someone realizes that important thing unsaid
Such a person appeared before me……
Here goes the story of a spring.
Told by Sawanobori.
(from artist book Spring in Desert. chapter 1)

……A friend of mine told me, quite out of blue, that she had an image of my inner self being like a spring in a desert. This was quite strange because at that very time I was thinking of creating a work expressing my inner image of water in a form different from A Journey to the Original Spring. My friend knew that work, so it was of cource quite plausible that she would have this image of water. Or I could simply seen it as a coincidence and ignore it. But I decided to view it meaningful and mysterious, because that was more interesting. I thought that looking at this occurrence from the view point of synchronicity might suggest a large quantity of water in background. That was the starting point of Spring in Desert. I asked my friend to produce a water color painting of her image of spring and then I began interviewing people in the community where I grew up.
(from interview with Toshiaki Tomita, Password: a Danish/Japanese Dialogue cat.)