As a parallel to Asako Shiroki’s exhibition in the gallery, Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone present their film ‘Pattern’, which features Shiroki at work.

‘Pattern’ is a suite of three intently observed portraits; of a woodworker making a complex joint, the maker of a hand-built geodesic dome and a gardener shaping the future growth of a tree, as they make, envisage, and describe things they are intimately close to and understand intuitively.

Focussing on bodies, hands, gestures, and glances ‘Pattern’ emphasises the subjects’ complete absorption in their tasks and draws the viewer into that same immersive, meditative ‘time out of time’.

Ellard and Johnstone will discuss their film through its overlaps and echoes with Shiroki’s exhibition; their shared interest in the hand, material processes, craft, making, and the particular form of experience generated in close and intent attention to detail – as well as how these projects have been imprinted by the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic.

This event is part of the current exhibition at Daiwa Japan House Gallery, The wind blows in by Asako Shiroki.

About the contributors

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have worked collaboratively since 1993, and since 2007, exclusively in 16mm film to explore architecture – typically modernist and mostly ‘visionary’ – often combined with archive material, drawings, models, studio recreations and the activities of ‘making’.

At the centre of their films is a concern with the altered forms of attention, and the resulting intensity of looking, that comes from using a lens to frame and magnify architectural details and fleeting atmospheric effects. Their work has been shown in galleries and museums internationally, including Guggenheim New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Image Forum, Tokyo; MAXXI, Rome; Tate Britain; Tramway, Glasgow; Stroom Den Hague; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Triennale Design Museum Milan; MOMA, Sydney; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.