Journal · Studio visit
Inside Ren Ishida’s Foundry Practice
Four days among casting tools, brass joints and nearly silent movements reveal how the sculptures in Small Motions came together.
Ren Ishida’s workspace is compact, orderly and always sounding. Cooling metal ticks from one corner while files, motors and lengths of fine cable occupy a bench beneath the window. The eleven figures for Small Motions wait nearby at different stages of assembly.
Ishida tests each movement with tweezers. A turn of only a few millimetres is enough; anything broader would make the mechanism perform instead of breathe. The cables remain exposed because, for Ishida, their route across a bronze body is another kind of drawn line.
After dark, the same workshop becomes a recording room. Fans, tools and the settling foundry are gathered into Low Weather, the four-channel work heard at the end of the exhibition. In the morning, Ishida listens again before adjusting the figures to its pace.
Small Motions is presented in Stockholm through 21 July.
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