Each living thing, plant or animal, has a soul: my art is revealing the soul. – Kazuo Kadonaga
When Kazuo Kadonaga began making art in the early 1970s, he turned to a familiar material: wood. Kadonaga’s family ran a lumber mill, and the material and craft associated with it are certainly familiar to him. Yet, rather than alter the material for commercial use, Kadonaga set out to reveal its essence with minimal artistic intervention. In Wood No. 11 BK, Kadonaga cuts a grid of lines in one end of a cedar log. As the wood responds to Kadonaga’s suggested grid, it splits in ways that reveal the inherent properties of the material, seen in the shifting lines that travel the length of the drying wood. The result is a kind of quiet conversation between Kadonaga and the cedar log. Kadonaga’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous public collections in the US and Japan.
