Since childhood, Kikuchi Torasuke has watched the same footage on videotape. He plays it back, again and again. With each playback the magnetic coating wears, and the image recedes a little. Without touching, nothing can be seen. Yet each touch makes the state before it irretrievable. When one faces the image, the distance between viewer and image disappears: the time of the image becomes one's own time. And yet the very attempt to draw close alters the object, and what one touches is only ever what has already been altered.
Kikuchi carves camphor wood. The moment the chisel enters, what it has carved cannot return. The years the tree has accumulated intervene in the present of making, and the carving hand responds.
Kikuchi's sculpture does not stand before that touch. It is the irreversible surface that comes after touch has already happened. Most works take the form of relief: though sculpture, the viewer can only meet the work at its surface. The exchange between wood and hand that took place within remains only as trace.
