A beaver chews a piece of wood. Its teeth follow the grain, avoid the knots, and gradually transform the timber. The animal is not thinking about sculpture. It is simply being a beaver. Yet some of the things left behind can look uncannily familiar to us. When Aki Inomata first encountered photographs of wood gnawed by beavers, she was struck by the beauty of the forms. Some, she says, looked surprisingly like the human body and reminded her of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and the Buddhist sculptor Enkū. The resemblance raised a question that has continued to run through her work: If a beaver produces a form that we recognize as sculpture, who—or what—is the sculptor?
That question is at the heart of How to Carve a Sculpture (2018–ongoing), a work that gives particular depth to “Mit-Werden,” Inomata’s current exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The show, her first solo presentation in Germany, brings together three recent series, but the beaver work reveals something fundamental about how Inomata’s practice has developed. She does not begin with a fixed image, then ask another being or a machine to reproduce it. She creates situations in which form can emerge through encounters that bring together animals, materials, technologies, and the artist.
In How to Carve a Sculpture, beavers chew pieces of wood as part of their ordinary lives. The marks they leave behind are by-products of feeding, building, and maintaining their teeth. Inomata takes those forms seriously—not because the animals intended to make art, but precisely because they did not. The beaver, the tree, the artist, and eventually fabrication techniques all enter into the making of the work. The question of authorship becomes layered rather than settled.
Inomata’s interest in this kind of unpredictability has roots in her student years, when she worked with computers and programming. She became dissatisfied when natural elements incorporated into a digital system behaved exactly as they had been programmed or simulated to behave. The problem was not technology itself. It was the absence of surprise.
Why Not Hand Over a “Shelter” to Hermit Crabs? (2009–ongoing) became a turning point. Inomata designed artificial shells based on human architecture and offered them to hermit crabs. The crabs rejected some of the first shelters. Instead of treating that rejection as failure, she changed the designs and tried again. Through CT scanning of natural shells, she discovered how important an internal spiral and smooth surfaces were to the animals. Three-dimensional printing then allowed her to preserve complex internal structures while transforming the exteriors into forms associated with human buildings. The process taught her to work with uncertainty. Inomata describes it almost as a session: she does something, the animal responds, and she responds in turn. She is still setting conditions, but she is not determining every outcome. There has to be room for the encounter to change both the work and her thinking.
This distinction is important when considering the word “collaboration,” which Inomata herself uses. She is careful about what she means by it. A beaver does not know that it is participating in an artwork, and a hermit crab does not share the artist’s intention. There is no common project in the human sense. Instead, Inomata borrows activities that already belong to other creatures—the beaver’s gnawing, the hermit crab’s changing of shells, the bagworm’s construction of its case—and allows their responses to affect what she does next.
Technology occupies an equally complicated position. It can extend human control, but it can also provide a way of approaching forms of life and perception that remain beyond direct human understanding. In How to Carve a Sculpture, CNC technology can reproduce a beaver-made form with extraordinary precision. Yet the machine follows predetermined paths and does not respond to the grain, knots, or changing resistance of the wood in the way that the beaver—or a human sculptor—does. The machine therefore introduces another layer of difference. Even controlled reproduction leaves its own traces. The result is a chain of transformations. The beaver acts on the tree; Inomata receives the resulting form; the form is scanned, enlarged, translated, and reproduced; the sculptor and the CNC machine add further decisions and marks. No single participant can claim the whole process.
The same logic helps to explain the broader constellation of works in Inomata’s practice. In Lines—Listening to the Growth Lines of Molluscan Shells (2015–ongoing), the growth lines of mollusk shells become a way of listening to environmental histories. In I Wear the Dog’s Hair, and the Dog Wears My Hair (2014), Inomata and her dog exchange capes made from each other’s hair, turning an intimate relationship into a physical exchange. In both cases, the work begins with attention to something already happening in the world rather than with an image imposed upon it.
“Mit-Werden” extends this approach into a broader field of relations. The German title can be understood as “becoming-with,” a phrase that resonates with Donna Haraway’s writing on sympoiesis, or making-with. Inomata also finds a useful analogy in Haraway’s idea of “string figures”: one participant receives a configuration from another, transforms it through movement and action, and passes it on. The configuration changes each time it is received. That description comes close to the structure of Inomata’s practice. The form made by a beaver is already a relation between animal and wood: the beaver’s teeth meet the hardness, fibers, thickness, and growth of a particular tree. When Inomata receives that form, she does not simply preserve it. She translates it through another set of bodies and technologies. Each transfer introduces a new difference.
Her work therefore raises questions of communication as much as authorship. Because she cannot communicate with the animals through language, Inomata is interested in how another creature can influence her without being fully understood. She hesitates to call this conventional communication. What matters is the recognition that the other remains partly inaccessible. We can watch what another being does, respond to it, and allow it to change our actions without claiming that we understand its intentions completely.
This is perhaps where the quiet force of Inomata’s work lies. It does not ask us to imagine that humans and other species are suddenly speaking the same language. It asks something more difficult: whether a relationship can begin precisely where complete understanding ends. Seen from this perspective, the works in “Mit-Werden” are less a collection of objects than evidence of processes. Their forms carry traces of animals, plants, materials, human decisions, machines, environments, and time. The sculpture is never only the thing in front of us. It is also the sequence of encounters that brought it into being.
Inomata says that this approach did not emerge from one conscious decision. She tends to begin with something puzzling or interesting, and the questions develop through making, almost in a spiral. Looking back, however, she can see a continuity: dissatisfaction with programmed outcomes led to encounters in which another living being could change the work; those encounters led to questions about who makes a form; and those questions opened onto a larger understanding of making as a distributed process. Perhaps, then, the question “Who is the sculptor?” has no single answer. The beaver is one answer. The tree is another. The artist is another. So are the CNC machine, the material itself, and the conditions that make these encounters possible. What matters is not assigning credit, but noticing how form emerges through entanglement.
For Inomata, that shift changes what sculpture can be. The finished object remains important, but it is no longer the whole story. Behind it lies a chain of relationships, each participant altering what comes next. To look at the sculpture closely is therefore to look not only at what has been made, but at who—and what—has been allowed to make it.
Aki Inomata’s “Mit-Werden” is on view at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany through November 1, 2026.
