The Object Has to Survive the Idea — On Geta

A drawing can lie.

An object cannot.

On paper, almost anything can be elegant.

A shoe can float. A chair can forget weight. A building can postpone plumbing until the rendering is finished.

Then somebody has to wear it, sit on it, or live inside it.

Reality enters the conversation.

We are making geta.

Not a museum reconstruction and not an attempt to “improve” an old Japanese form.

The question is more interesting than that:

What happens when an inherited form is asked to live now?

— Two teeth —

The architecture is brutally simple.

A platform.

Two supports underneath.

A foot above.

That simplicity is deceptive.

Move one proportion and the whole object changes character.

Too heavy and it becomes costume.

Too polished and it becomes souvenir.

Too aggressively futuristic and the intelligence of the original form disappears under the designer's ego.

This is the part of making that interests me most: the moment when style stops being decoration and becomes a technical problem.

The current Geta · The Best Place is a handmade object in wood, lacquer and paint.

It has to create a silhouette.

It also has to carry a body.

One requirement is poetic.

The other is physics.

Neither can be negotiated away.

— The foot is an editor —

We often talk about critique as if it comes from another person.

Objects have their own critics.

A chair is reviewed by the spine.

A cup is reviewed by the hand.

A shoe is reviewed by the foot.

The foot has no respect for an artist statement.

If the balance is wrong, it knows.

If the weight is wrong, it knows.

If the form asks the body to perform an idea rather than inhabit it, the body sends the work back for revision.

There is something healthy about this.

Art can become very good at protecting itself with language.

Matter is less polite.

— Is it art? —

The old question is whether an object belongs to art or design.

I find another distinction more useful.

Some objects close a question.

Others open one.

A conventional shoe answers:

How do I protect the foot?

A geta can suddenly ask:

Why should a contemporary body move through a city in this particular way?

Why has clothing become visually adventurous while the architecture beneath our feet remains comparatively conservative?

Why can a form with centuries behind it feel stranger on a modern street than something designed last month?

These are not reasons to put the object in a museum.

They are reasons to make it.

— The danger of reverence —

Tradition can be damaged by neglect.

It can also be frozen by reverence.

If an inherited form becomes untouchable, preservation quietly turns into taxidermy.

Continuation is riskier.

Continuation permits translation.

It permits mistakes.

It allows somebody in another place and another century to misunderstand a form productively — while still being precise about what is inherited and what is newly invented.

This is also why we have become more careful with the language around kintsugi.

I use Master of Kintsugi as an artistic identity, not as a traditional Japanese craft certification.

The distinction matters because the tradition matters.

Next year in Nara, I want the metaphor of repair to meet the resistance of actual material: lacquer, patience, technique, time.

Before that, there are these shoes.

— The test —

When the pair is finished, I do not want the first question to be:

Is it art?

I want somebody to put them on.

Stand.

Take a step.

Maybe laugh.

Maybe hate them.

Take another step.

An idea becomes interesting when reality is allowed to answer back.

Wednesday, 7 October 2026