Megumi Matsubara – A proposal for a textbook to learn Braille English and other languages

La FonderiaArtistica Battaglia Milano e Voice gallery presentano il lavoro in bronzo dell’artista
Matsubara.

Comunicato stampa

When we close our eyes, what do we see?
"A proposal for a textbook to learn Braille, English, and other languages"
is an assemblage of internal visions:
a modest presentation of the vast field of profundity where language becomes obscure,
yet true to its original raison d'être;
a means to describe one’s internal vision, and not external images.
- Megumi Matsubara

Fonderia Artistica Battaglia and Voice gallery present the bronze work of Japanese artist Megumi Matsubara:
"A proposal for a textbook to learn Braille, English, and other languages" is a series of bronze sculptures casted from clay sculptures made by blind students. Those original clay sculptures were made during pottery workshops arranged by Megumi Matsubara in Morocco and Egypt in 2012. The first workshop took place on the 15th of June at the Berber Museum of Ourika with eleven blind and visually-impaired children from IDMAJ, as part of the artist's solo exhibition RÊVEURS RÊVE RÊVES at La Maison de La Photographie de Marrakech. The second workshop was held on the 12th of October at Darb 1718 in Cairo, and included thirteen blind and visually-impaired girls from Al Nour Wal Amal Association during the Artbeat Music, Art and Craft Festival followed by an exhibition of the sculptures.

The original clay sculptures were easily breakable. In 2014, Matsubara casted a selection of them into bronze at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia Milano.
The process began with the artist and a team of conservators to restore and reinforce the original objects. Every piece was patiently restored referring to the artist's memory and her photographs. Some of them could hardly resist the molding process. The most delicate pieces were disintegrated into soil, after the molds were completed. This exhibition is the first opportunity to showcase the finished bronze edition, featuring a complete set of thirty sculptures.

Some of them that were too fragile to cast still live in an imagery work created prior to the bronze sculptures with the same title in 2012: a series of coupled images consisting of photographs of the original clay sculptures and texts written in Graphic Braille and English describing the sculptures.

An artist book with the same title, edition of five hundred copies was also printed in March 2013