Plausibly Impossible: Hirotoshi Itoh's Grinning Stones

photo from TruShu's stream
Hirotoshi Itoh
Keiko Gallery

The author and title have long slipped my mind, but I once saw a poem lamenting how arbitrary we can be in calling certain things alive, and others not. Though many of them contain remnants of life, biologically speaking, stones are not alive. But who has felt a smooth, ancient pebble warm against the cupped palm, without feeling some affinity - some sense of a shared heritage?

Hirotoshi Itoh's sculptures tap into the numinous sense that stones, too, live. But he's hardly all mystical and spiritual about it; in fact, he's downright silly. His stones are full of coins, shells, coffee beans, grinning teeth, the silk lining of a purse - and they "open" with zippers! Itoh's stones are the practical jokes nature might play on us, if our world were more like a children's book, and our definitions of life a little less strict.

While the smiling stones at the top of the post first caught my eye, my favorites are the stones full of shells. The idea of packing a whole beach into a single stone is satisfyingly meta. And the fact that stones are often full of shells (albeit fossils) makes the visual joke even better.

Itoh also does cunning trompe l'oiel work - folded shirts made of stone, etc. But I find that side of things much less captivating because it reproduces exactly what we expect, rather than surprising us with something plausibly impossible - something that makes the child within us say, "I knew it!"

Another wonderful discovery from the Coilhouse Blog.