This text serves as the documentation of how I encountered deer blood, the fifth material I started using—after masking tape, local soil, flour, and white road marking paint—following my participation in Reborn-Art Festival. I will here publish text, photographic documentation, and photographs and videos of my works.
November 15, 2019. Sunny
Meeting up on the Oshika Peninsula, Ishinomaki, at seven o’clock.
Joining Onodera’s deer hunt and collecting about six plastic bottles of blood from wild deer.
Onodera let me join the group hunt with three hunting dogs in the morning and afternoon across a wide area, and his words—“There appears to be a lot of hunting grounds but the ones with perfect conditions where I can actually pull a trigger are limited, and I hunt like I am wringing out the last drops from a rag, like I am gambling”—stick in my head.
Moving to our positions and releasing the dogs about ten kilometers away, we change location constantly in a short distance while reading the movement of the dogs by GPS, the autumnal mountain covered with fallen leaves, finding it difficult to walk while holding my breath and making as little noise as possible, hearing the sound of stepping on dry leaves louder than usual, arriving in position to hold still and wait for the moment to come, time passing at incredible speed with the tension I am feeling. A gunshot. The negotiation between nature and people¬, the life that was running around in the field just before now, in a moment, lies dead on the dry leaves. Instant death.
When I look up, many birds that I didn’t see before are flying in a circle in the bright blue sky, and, told that it is auspicious, I am given the cartridge removed from the rifle. The dull golden cartridge looks like a musical instrument, and as I hold it tightly with my eyes closed in the woods, the shape that I’m supposed to make comes into my mind, the image to be embedded in a sculpture, and I gently put the cartridge in my pocket. Pierced in the vital part on the neck to make its meat tastes better, the deer is taken apart and skinned skillfully in front of me, a distinct smell, though the deer’s blood doesn’t flow recklessly during this process, the body split into separate parts and then removed one after the other, looking bright red and shining like jewels, and then spotting a large blood vessel and cutting it with a knife, blood starts dripping out and when the hind legs are lifted for me, I direct a stream of blood into a plastic bottle through a funnel placed over it, and then sense the warm blood over the plastic. The deer’s heart is taken out and the hunting dogs eat nosily and with relish; wildlife carries on. While thinking that the site where a deer is butchered is not as bloody as I had imagined, what I actually witness is more convincing and instructive than surprising. How to walk in the mountains, move as a team, interact with dogs, the state of life, sense of touch and smell, determination and promises in the forest.
Eighteen years since I made the curious decision that I would one day draw with blood, I now feel myself trembling to be able to draw with blood while first thankful that it wasn’t that of a human.
