After Efflorescence: Awakening the Whale Beneath Us

Koretsune Sakura, who studied native arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is interested in the relationship between cetaceans and humans, and has presented the knowledge she has gained on the topic through her fieldwork conducted around the world in the form of essays and poems that she has published and works of embroidery that she has exhibited.
Some bone tools made from cetaceans have been found in shell middens from the prehistoric Jomon Period on the Atsumi Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture, and it can be inferred that people have eaten whales that washed ashore and used their bones to make tools since ancient times. The Morozaki district at the southern end of the Chita Peninsula is known as the place where the technique of whaling using handheld harpoons originated. The technique, which spread to Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture and other parts of Japan in the early Edo Period, was eventually lost in Morozaki, but traces of it can still be felt today in the festivals of Yokkaichi in Mie Prefecture, on the other side of Ise Bay. Furthermore, during the period after World War II when obtaining food was difficult, and whaling ships brought back salted whale meat from the Antarctic Ocean, the salt steeped in whale blubber and blood was used as an inexpensive glaze for clay pipes in Tokoname, which, like Seto, had a flourishing ceramics industry.
Having uncovered this surprisingly deep connection between Aichi Prefecture and cetaceans, Koretsune aims to bring back images of the whales that were forgotten as communities underwent modernization. The full skeleton of a whale lying at the end of a fishing net dyed in the color of the sea was created by combining elements such as the bones of a sperm whale that washed ashore in the Port of Nagoya, clay pipes that were part of an underground network that once extended throughout Japan, and salt glaze ceramics made to look like bones. Over this, another huge whale made of embroidery swims leisurely.