長田果純

Kasumi Osada

The Star Fragments series explores the nature of existence and time through stones.
When the artist returned to stones that had been familiar since childhood and looked at them anew, a gaze that had once turned inward quietly opened toward the outer world. In that moment, memories and landscapes, the self and the world, began to feel gently connected.

The patterns and scars etched into the surfaces of stones carry traces of time that has passed, like wrinkles or marks on human skin. Photographing them is an act of touching layers of time, a way of quietly sensing the forms of living and existing. Stones, skin, memories, and landscapes—while remaining distinct—lose the boundaries between macro and micro, and come to be perceived as something continuously connected.

This exhibition takes place in a meditation room where only a small amount of light enters. The environment softly restricts vision, gently separating the viewer from ordinary time and bodily awareness. The act of looking at photographs expands beyond a simple perceptual shift, becoming an experience of touching layers of time and existence, and creating a sense of immersion, as if one were cast into another realm. The wet plate process—an early photographic technique that requires time and attentiveness for a single image—also embodies a meditative temporality, deeply resonating with the nature of the space.

From a cosmic perspective, stones, people, and memories are all fragments of stardust drifting within the same cycle. This work is born from that circulation and will continue to evolve in changing forms. What is presented here is one manifestation that has emerged along the way—one figure of the series at this particular moment.