Nine Hundred Days of Rain

Since 3 February 1997 Teruko Nagai has made one ink drawing a day. This exhibition presented nine hundred consecutive sheets, from 1 June 2021 to 17 November 2023, hung in eleven rows across the four walls of The Annex.

The rule has not changed in twenty-nine years. One sheet of 24 by 33 centimetres, one sitting, sumi ink, no correction, no discarding. Everything else is allowed to vary and does. The amount of water, the condition of the brush, the temperature of the room, whether she is at her table in Kyoto or in a hotel. Two drawings made in the same week can share nothing.

Hung in quantity, other things become visible. There are long runs where the ink stays dark for weeks and then a fortnight where every sheet is thin and grey. Nagai says she does not put these there and cannot account for them, and that she only notices them when the drawings are laid out for exhibition, which is rare. She does not keep them in view at home.

The paper is her own, kozo fibre beaten by hand during a six-week stretch each winter when the water in the workshop is cold enough to stop the fibres souring. One winter’s production supplies the following year, so a poor batch simply becomes that year’s condition. The paper made in the winter of 2021 was, by her account, the worst in a decade. It covers the middle third of this exhibition.

The series has no title and no planned endpoint.