Takako Araki’s decaying Bibles

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Bibles made of clay rescued from the ravages of time, mildew and fire: ceramic artist Takako Araki (1921-2005) has turned these powerful yet equally fragile blocks into meaningful pieces. A few snatches of printed phrases dot the pieces, with their burnt, gnawed and deteriorated pages. You can sense the humidity that would have warped the pages of bible paper, the smell of burnt paper that has almost turned to ash, the cold that would have frozen the holy books. The sheets of clay, almost as thin as bible paper and seemingly threatening to crumble at the slightest touch, the ceramist has inserted them one by one into the book she creates, using tweezers. These works are often displayed on a layer of sand, as if they had just been found, unearthed like an archaeological object resurfacing after hundreds of years. The smoky firing technique accentuates the vestige aspect, and every piece is full of shadow, even the white Bible. With these objects, at once fragile and resilient, Araki has turned the Bible into a new object of Vanitas, drawing on her painful inner battles with the Christian faith.

Born into a family from Nishinomiya, near Osaka, Araki spent almost twenty years working almost exclusively on this project, which she matured after the death in 1978 of her tuberculosis-stricken brother, a fervent believer, and whose doubts about her family’s beliefs, right up to the blossoming of her atheism, envelop these works. If the degeneration of these holy books offered up to the whims of the elements is at the heart of his project, other pieces insist more on the materiality of the object, moving away from the representation of the book: the Water Bible, for example, becomes a small puddle in the sand; the Stone Bible, a piece of rock; the Frozen Bible, a fossilized pebble. Witness to the Atomic Bomb is a blackened Bible devastated by radiation – an allusion to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

“For me, making the series of Bibles was a way of trying to solve the problem of knowing who I am, what I am »: for Araki, these Bibles are « works of self-dissection ». In other words, open-heart ceramics.