Fractured words ultimately crystalise
Sen Naganawa

Closed books, rubbed out words, carved up dictionaries . . . is Cécile trying to put thisverbiage to sleep, to fossilise words like beautiful crystals in the silent depths of the earth?
No, surely she wants to revive the unspoken spirits of all things visible, the cries of theirsouls prior to worded meanings. Spoken words and written letters must convey in order tomean. But words can be misconstrued, as when superficial interpretations are taken fortrue meaning, distorting the real idea. Cécile wants to liberate conflicted words from theirown incurable ills.
Possessed of a strong will to regenerate words — to reawaken their true latent power —Cécile has dared as an artist to pare away their meanings. In her hands, words are reduced
to voiceless letters, to meaningless signs, to prearticulate primitive particles, to modelledshapes. Taking on material textures and lovely colours to speak a new formative aesthetic
language, their displacement outside of books and manuscripts prompts viewers to puzzle
over her intent.
To solve the riddles embedded in Cécile’s works is to question the value of words andhow very important it is for us to invent formative language shared in common with theworld. Letters turned into matter stripped of meaning are specially suited as material for
artistic creation; their signification in art no doubt avails upon afterimages of thosedeconstructed words. How we recreate those afterimages in our mind’s eye and decipher
them as a crystalised art language is thus a key to appreciating Cécile’s works.
More than just words, however, the architectural setting of the works is another important
key to Cécile’s formative creation. Most of her installations fit seamlessly to the shape ofwindows, walls and floors so as to reconfigure such spatial characteristics and historic
aspects into the works as aesthetic signs.
This time, her chosen site is the Edo period clan house Chihan’an in Izu, where in placeof tatami mats she has carpeted three Japanese-style rooms with soft, enticing squares ofshredded paper. Patterns from red kimono for swaddling newborn infants, tanzaku poetry
calligraphs, clan elders’ wills . . . diverse heritage materials evoking the inner life of thehousehold were first slivered to equinimity, then plowed under as if a rich mulch to summon
forth new vitality from this historic dwelling. The result is a space of wordless stillness where
we confront a grand pageant of time, of reincarnating generations cycling repeatedly frombirth to death.
Cécile also took interest in the backyard grove of bamboo, cedars and cypresses. Hereand there upon the mute trees, smaller works sprout forth like dotted ellipses betweenphrases, expressing the wordless spells of forest spirits . . . Simple mounded forms, theymust embody Cécile’s ideal image of the souls of words.
Over the short span between birth and death, people entrust their life to words,
passing on what meaning they find to deserving others. The wisdom of our ancestors
recorded in history is layered thick with words like so much earth. Cécile crosses overcultural differences to plough that vast fertile ground of words through her art. As sheherself notes, the French word culture connotes both agrarian and mental cultivation: tillingthe fields to sow crops for sustenance and likewise tilling the mind to raise culture and art.
And so here at Chihan’an, a setting that fairly breathes history and culture, Cécile farms
language so the seeds of art she plants may grow a yet newer culture in the mind of all whocome visit.

translated by Alfred Birnbaum, © Chihan Art. All Rights Reserved.