ARTIST’S FOREWORD

(New Views of the Canyon)

Geologically Human: Travel through Times and Cultures with Earth’s Materials

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda

Music and field recording, composed and performed by Shoko Nagai

I have been fascinated by materials, where they come from and how we as humans have manipulated them over the years. My mother was my first influence in this regard, as she would often create something from scratch on her own—tracing the origins of each material to their earliest essence. For example, when I was a teenager, she needed to make a cushion cover. For this, she went all the way back to the silkworm, raised them, dyed the silk, then weaved it with an old-fashioned loom that took up the entirety of our modest living room in Japan. This entire experiment was to produce the fabric for the cover that we sit on, a humble but essential object. I see my mother’s spirit in my artistic approach, following materials to their natural source. 

Fast forward to 2019 in the US, working as an artist, I began to thoroughly research one of my chief materials, Sumi—an ink traditionally used in East Asia for writing and drawing made from soot and animal glue. I took a deep dive into thinking about this ink from both scientific and cultural perspectives. Holistically researching Sumi—a material created from burning organic matter—has allowed me to see the relationship between the land (which provides) and us humans (who utilize). 

From a chemistry lab in Dallas to Michigan’s forests to the fields of Poland, over the past six years, I have experimented with harvesting soot from a specific place to represent its specific landscape—capturing the essence of the land. For these site-specific works, I gain inspiration from not only the landscape itself but also the culture of the people who live on the land. Therefore, I symbolically harvest both materials and inspiration which eventually converse physically and conceptually on the surfaces of my paintings.

During this process of investigation and excavation of material embodiment in my art making, I also began to examine another relationship, this time between the visual and aural worlds. As I am an amateur piano and recorder player, I always saw intriguing connections between the visual artworks that I make and the sounds that are made in music. In fact, I have been told by those who listen to my music that I “doodle” on piano. This musical “doodling” catalyzed visual forms for me that I can see through textures, values, and, of course, some movements.

In 2023, I began to create music pieces for my own paintings. My idea was to use a digital music platform to create a 30 second to 2 minute piece for each of my paintings for an upcoming exhibition in New York. However, I quickly realized how difficult it is to create music, let alone to use a musical digital application. Around that time, miraculously, one email arrived in my inbox. It was from Shoko Nagai, an experimental musician and composer based in New York. She saw my work somewhere in the past and wanted to connect with me. I trembled with excitement, and I felt some sort of destiny. In the following year, during our first meeting in New York, I immediately felt an intimate aesthetic connection with Shoko and her music. 

Connecting with Nagai, an aesthetic kindred spirit, was a serendipitous yet groundbreaking moment for my artistic practice. Around the same time of our meeting, in early 2024, Jon Revett, the Department Head of Art, Theatre, and Dance and Professor of Art, at West Texas A&M University invited me to artistically respond to Palo Duro Canyon in west Texas, the second largest canyon in the US. This proposal felt like a dream come true—I get to work with the land in Texas, the state I call my home!

At that point, I had visited the canyon as a tourist but had never put on an artist research hat. With such an exciting opportunity, I began getting to know Palo Duro Canyon. It was through a simple online search that taught me of the one-hundred-fifty-year anniversary of the end of the Red River War. This war was a military campaign launched by the United States Army in 1874 to displace the Indian groups from this area of Texas. This sad discovery shifted my excitement to work with the canyon to a feeling that was both haunting and daunting. Even though I have lived in Texas for several years, learning this history, I felt like a foreigner in my own state and questioned if I was the right person to engage with this site.

With some encouragement from Jon to be open minded, I visited the canyon with his art students who later became my collaborators. The day we visited happened to be a day after a heavy rain, therefore, everywhere we went, our footsteps were the first ones to create marks (except for some racoons’ lovely footsteps on the ground). Dramatically contrasted against the clear blue sky, colored by the sandstone, the river itself appeared to be very red. This redness and the redness of the cliffs significantly impacted me. I found myself relating to Georgia O’Keeffe and how she responded to the canyon’s red hues in her paintings inspired by her stay in Canyon, TX from 1916 to 1918. While I was processing my own sensations in the canyon, I still felt the haunted sense I experienced after my initial Google search. I thought “who am I to respond to the land as a Japanese-American artist living six hours away in Dallas.” 

However, my mind was blown away at the Palo Duro Canyon State Park’s information center where I encountered a diagram of the land formation of the canyon. This diagram explained the geological years of the park. As I write and you read this, we exist on the top layer of the earth’s crust formed in the Quarternary Age Layer (from 2 million years ago). But, in the deepest part of the canyon is the earth formed 250 million years ago, the Permian Age Layer. 250 million! Not 250 years, but 250 MILLION years ago. Compared to the earth’s history, we humans are just a spec! I immediately felt so small and our human history was also made smaller. “Liberated” I felt, at the end of this survey trip, I told myself that “I don’t have to respond to the land’s recent history, I am going to respond to the deep history of the earth itself!”

After several days of the initial survey trip, I had some realizations that informed my approach to this project, Geologically Human. 

First, I confirmed how humbly small I am against nature and its power, taking note of the strength of the river. Because of the canyon’s conditions when I first visited—clear weather, windy after a heavy rain—I had a heightened “red” impression. At the same time, something in the air was biting my skin and gave me a rash. Furthermore, I wanted to touch the ground and you can imagine the posture needed to do such an action—I was kneeling to the ground and bending my body down to it. This pose allowed me to be extremely humble, almost surrendering myself to the earth. After bending for a long period of time, my already not so great back started aching. With the rash on my skin and back pain, I physically and cerebrally felt the massiveness and vastness of nature, and its unforgivingness—something that a Mount Everest climber might experience.

Second, these abstract and physical feelings towards nature’s power echoed in my visual sensations. There were so many things, literally millions of things, to observe and capture in the canyon. Because of my trip’s timing after a storm, I could observe the dichotomy of a peaceful clear day and the previous day’s violence. For example, a tree caught pieces of grass on its branches because of the storm’s flash floods. I was also attracted to a myriad of objects and elements from small grains of sand to insects, from leaves chatting to the water growling, and from the wetness of the red mud (silt) in the river in front of me to the burning red of the massive cliff in the canyon miles away. I opened my sketchbook and started sketching whatever I saw and felt. Then, I realized that I needed an interpreter, a sort of mediator or a guide to digest my innumerable sensations.

Around that time, for a different artistic project, I was asked to produce a series of artworks to accompany a set of 15 poems. The poems were written in German and translated into English, but they have also been translated into music. The composer was Paul Hindemith, and I decided to work not from the poems but from Hindemith’s musical interpretations for my own visual interpretations. This process of the poems via music felt so natural to me. You know where I am going with this. Yes, I wanted to have a musician/composer interpret the massiveness of the canyon for me so that I could create artworks from the music in addition to my own research of the canyon. I called up Shoko, the musician, and asked her to come to the Palo Duro Canyon with me.

In late December 2024, Shoko and I took a short yet intense trip to the Palo Duro Canyon. Our senses felt heightened on this trip. Not only could we explore on our own, but a full moon accompanied us. Our conversations liberated my artistic approach. 

Shoko hummed, and I tried to capture the relationship between the melody of her humming and the landscape in my sketchbook. Shortly after the trip, Shoko produced two pieces of music. In my opinion, these works operate on both macro and micro levels. On the one hand, they invite listeners to zoom out and consider their smallness in connection to and within the universe. On the other hand, they also encourage listeners to zoom in and make them aware of their own inner worlds. The music is subtle yet full of power hidden underneath. I began sketching while listening to the music, closing my eyes to recapture the experience I had at the canyon, aided and guided by the music. Her music became the mediator between myself and my experience of the land.

As I began to create in my Dallas studio, with the music continuously playing in the background, I began to face the materials that I had collected from the canyon system, trying to “listen” to them as well. Like harvesting soot from a specific place to represent its specific landscape in my past Sumi research, this time, I harvested pigment from the red sandstone as well as some gypsum from the canyon system. They, a portion of the great nature formed 250 million years ago, were in my studio with me, who is alive in the year of 2025. I needed to pay respect to the materials which not only represent but are themselves the history of deep earth. 

Material transformation is a magic that I conduct in my studio. This activity is sacred and profoundly affects my artistic decisions for applying paints, composing, and expressing thoughts in my works. In addition to learning from my scientist colleagues as well as my own research on and my relationship to the materials, I put my experimentation into high gear and drove through this magical process of material transformation. This kind of alchemy can also be described as chemistry experimentation. For example, pieces of gypsum that I collected from the canyon system were baked in the oven to be transformed into plaster. This process is forged through heating and rehydration, and the gypsum (calcium sulfate dihydrate) becomes a fine powder called plaster of Paris (calcium sulfate hemihydrate). I then add water which makes the plaster rapidly harden back into gypsum. However, by continuously stirring the mixture to prevent it from hardening, I make “dead plaster.” I then use this “dead plaster” as a pigment. I combine it with animal glue to adhere the pigment onto my pre-gessoed surface. My gesso is a homemade ground containing alabaster, animal glue, and titanium white.

While these experiments in my studio were based on my previous research and new knowledge, I also realized the way I adhere pigments to the paintings’ surfaces to be something special to my background. It is basically the same as traditional Japanese painting—adhering pigments with animal glue on a surface. This realization made me feel good as a Japanese-American artist. By unconsciously referencing this rich tradition, I felt myself instinctively tapping into something inherently Japanese which as an artist trained primarily in the US was a surprising realization to make. These reflections made me feel closer to Japan, the home that hasn’t been my home for decades. I felt that utilizing the same process as traditional Japanese painting may be my way of respecting my heritage, unconsciously longing to belong to it again.

The students of West Texas A&M University, led by Jon Revett, have helped me for this project since its beginning in 2024. They later became collaborators for several works that are on display in the exhibition as they prepped and manipulated the painting’s wood surfaces. For this project, they used the laser cutter. The students converted the images of my drawings into digital files and manipulated the types and depth to make marks on wood panels. I then manipulated the panels again by reshaping and painting. Later in this laser cutter application, they experimented layering multiple images on the panels that I provided. They came out to have very intricate burnt marks, which looked shockingly beautiful.

Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge the importance of working with the students, young upcoming artists. Through their enthusiasm during the field trips and presence throughout this project, I felt myself become a better artist in that I felt a greater responsibility to nurture their burgeoning talents. I wanted to be the best that I could in front of them both artistically and humanly because my actions would be an example for the young artists. Being with the students also allowed me to clarify my concept. As I tend to think about my concept in my own head, I don’t necessarily talk aloud. Talking aloud with them forced me to find the words and helped me to refine the goals of this project. The catalogue that you hold now is the product of many hands, including the students. I am very grateful for their involvement.

In addition to the students of today, I found great inspiration in the work of artists of the past. Georgia O’Keeffe’s work produced during her stay does not look like my own. We are different in our own artistic development. Nonetheless, the impact of the canyon’s red-ness on us is what we share. Moreover, O’Keeffe is known for her independent, determined, and authentic character. There are many other facets to O’Keeffe, but these are the ones that I relate to, a sort of kinship I have with her. As I have been following my own artistic journey, I try not to compare myself with other people’s work. This is a hard mindset to adopt as an academic, however, throughout my career I have sought to concentrate primarily on my own inner world and how this engages with the outer world. However, with O’Keeffe, I am comforted by some of our overlaps in not only her solitude, but her inspiration found within Canyon, TX. 

We often personify nature. For example, nature can give to us, or nature punishes—this thinking can go on and on. Whether we witness it or not, however, nature follows its own course. This notion enhanced my feeling for the huge differences between the nature of reality and the nature that we romanticize. Similarly, another substantial difference that I feel is between the sense of time in human history and geological time in the earth’s history. Our seemingly ancient history and cultures don’t stand a chance in front of geological history. The music by Shoko helped me navigate through these differences and allowed me to feel the awe of inevitable connection to the earth more naturally. This gut level reaction to these differences in the perception of nature and time, as well as my physical experiences in the canyon ultimately became the fuel for me to create this exhibition.

In Geologically Human: Travel through Times and Cultures with Earth’s Materials, I share the wonder I felt with the Palo Duro Canyon with you, highlighting how the Texan landscape converses with Japanese culture materially and visually. As land unites all of us humans, I present tender conversations between two materials from two different continents as well as two different cultures. Sumi from Japan soaks into the dead plaster made of gypsum from Texas. These two materials are fusing in a chemical level as well as in the images and forms created on the surface of the paintings. Against the Alabaster and titanium white background, the red pigments from the canyon and the black Sumi forge conversations, welcoming viewers to form their own interpretations of muti-layered relationships—the relationships between the materials from Texas and Japan, the earth and human, and perhaps the universe and you and me.

January 2026