Flora [2015]
Budding Flower Goddess
Flora is a gigantic statue of a girl as a personification of plants, dressed in a colorful costume with flower ornaments on her head and hands. The statue repeatedly sits down as she closes her eyes, and then stands up opening her arms and eyes. It was a collaborative production of Yanobe with Sebastian Masuda, who is an art director and artist known for his vivid and colorful expressions. He designed the costume and decorations for the head and the objects in the statue’s hands.
As part of the Rimpa 400 Year Celebration Festival in 2015, Flora was shown for the first time at the exhibition PANTHEON held at the Kyoto Botanical Garden. Yanobe, Masuda and Kyota Takahashi provided a collaborative art piece for the exhibition. The exhibition explored a three-dimensional realization of Fujin Raijin Zu (the image of the Wind and Thunder Gods), a representative work of the Rimpa school. Flora was placed in the center of the room, alongside sculptures of Fujin (the Wind God) and Raijin (the Thunder God). It is said that when Tawaraya Sotatsu painted Fujin Raijin Zu, he was inspired by the statues of the Wind and Thunder Gods at Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto, where all first-class Buddhist sculptors of the Kei and In schools were fully mobilized to produce them.
Yanobe perceived the blank space in the center of the picture filled with gold leaf as a metaphoric expression of halos of one thousand Kannon statues in the temple. The project aimed to transform the Fujin, Raijin and Kannon, which were depicted as two-dimensional images, into three-dimensional sculptures after 400 years.
They decorated the prototype of Sun Sister and re-created it as Flora. It is also a name for the goddess of flowers, from which the “flora” in the Kyoto Botanical Garden took its name. The work Flora is based on images of the a forementioned Flora and Kannon—lotus flowers and ripples on a water surface are used in the design. The ripples are ones depicted on Kohakubai-zu Byobu (the Folding Screen of Red and White Plum Blossoms) by Ogata Korin. Furthermore, objects which containing LED lights were put inside the translucent costume, emitting mysterious rays. The collaboration with Sebastian Masuda opened up new possibilities for Yanobe.
Flora, which has taken over the gene of Sun Sister, could be associated with blossoming flowers and hope. The work has been favorably accepted in various places, including Fukushima Biennale 2016 in Nihonmatsu City.
