髙村啓子

Keiko Takamura

A gallery renovated from a Kyoto machiya over a century old becomes the site for constructing a Box Garden through silver‑gelatin photography. Plants immersed in darkroom water appear to come back to life, as if extending their roots throughout the machiya. The space is transformed into a Box Garden. By placing these plants—rendered through photographic processes—along the pillars, earthen walls, and traces of past lives, multiple layers of time emerge.
The machiya contains a hundred years of accumulated time. Added to this are the hours the artist spends photographing, developing, and printing, the duration of the exhibition itself, and the time visitors spend within the space. These distinct temporalities overlap like geological strata, filling the interior. On top of the machiya’s own memory, the photographs introduce another form of memory that settles into the space.
A Box Garden is an artificial environment that imitates nature while being carefully controlled and arranged by human hands. Photography similarly repeats the act of fixing nature through an artificial process. A Box Garden condenses a landscape into a small space, while photography compresses a vast moment of nature into a frame. Both function as devices for holding time still.
By treating the machiya as a Box Garden and constructing an intentionally artificial environment, this exhibition encloses past, present, and future within a single space.