Mineko Grimmer "Tower With Garden" (2:55)

Mineko Grimmer "Tower With Garden" (2:55)

Mineko Grimmer, whose works have as much to do with sound and aleatory music as they do with sculpture, traces it all back to her home in northern Japan. Born in Hanamaki and educated in Japan and at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Mineko makes sculptures of wood and metal, above which she suspends inverted pyramids of white or black pebbles frozen in ice. As the ice melts in the course of each daily exhibition, the pebbles fall with increasing rapidity striking the elements of bamboo, fir or pine, bronze or piano wire, and the pool of water, of which the sculpture is composed, creating a random series of sounds that are part of the work. In her home in northern Honshu, which she left eight years ago, Mineko says that she was able to watch "the icicles melt and refreeze all winter long," inspiring her current series of musical pieces. The basic materials and structure, as well as the tranquil if unpredictable sounds they generate, are, she says, "very Japanese," recalling the music of Japanese stringed instruments and percussion. She finds a similarity in the resonance of pebbles striking the bamboo rods of varying thickness to words being sung, and the occasional ring of stone on bronze to a "kind of punctuation" that interrupts the hypnotic effects of the sound of pebbles falling into the pool of water he recording presented here was made from a piece entitled "Tower With Garden," consisting of brass bar and water, and represents a continuous three-minute segment that occurred near the beginning of the process. Normally Mineko refrains from titling her works, feeling that each one has "many different meanings, different from viewer to viewer What artists say" she adds, "limits what viewers sue. I fuel that when I exhibit a work to the public, I give it up. It no longer belongs to me Be accompanying photograph of a tree trunk surmounted by a single pebble exhibits two key structural elements of her work.

But Mineko stresses the human scale rather than the mechanical construction of her sound sculptures. "Even though my works aren't figurative or referential," she says, "they are humanistic. Monuments to the victims of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust are powerful, overwhelming. I hope people will find as many deep meanings in my works, although they're gentler"

SOURCE http://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/artsounds/Artsounds_05_grimmer.mp3