Leeds, U.K.
In the snug environs of the Henry Moore Institute’s Study Gallery, Yoko Terauchi’s book-works offer intimations of a world of continuity and flow, of form spilling across boundaries in primary colors. Born in Tokyo in 1954, Terauchi studied sculpture at St. Martin’s from 1979 to 1981 and then received a Henry Moore Fellowship to attend Camberwell School of Art (1983–84). In April 1984, she completed a week-long performance-cum-sculpture project at Leeds City Art Gallery, documented in this show, during which she constructed sculptures in front of an audience. The 1980s were also marked by collaborations with Simon Cutts’s Coracle Press, associated, like Terauchi’s practice, with exploring the sculptural potential of the book and, in parallel, bringing the rhythm and logic of reading and sequential viewing to large-scale installations and constructions.
Five of Terauchi’s sculptural artist’s books, published by Coracle between the early 1980s and the 2010s, serve as the centerpieces of “Ebb and Flow” (on view through August 30, 2026). Together, Terra (1984), Ebb & Flow (1988), Cuckoo (1992), Coil / Join (1994), and One (2012) suggest a concern with establishing forms of literal and metaphorical continuity between inner and outer spaces and surfaces—the Möbius strip is a useful analogy for some of the techniques used to that end—and between multiplicity and singularity. At once unapologetically abstract and potentially suggestive of a mode of being-in-the-world, these works embody a kind of radical empathy or avowal of inter-connectivity that might suggest a Buddhist or Taoist cultural inheritance.
Terauchi’s book-sculptures take shape through the tearing, punching, or burning away of space and surface as much as through any positive process of accretion or construction. The title work, Ebb & Flow, is a case in point. It consists of thick paper concertinaed between two plywood boards, one side colored with rich red pigment, the other with blue. A single diagonal tear through the center of the paper is converted into mirrored zigzag forms upon opening the book, so that flicking through it—as captured in a 2017 film by Karen Atkinson and Ann Ratcliffe—is like gradually revealing a kind of elemental, expressionist landscape. The thresholds between recto and verso, front and back, surface and interior, are lithely overrun in the process.
To similar effect, Coil / Join features blind-embossed spirals on its front and back covers, which meet via a hole punched through the middle of the book, connecting their central points. One is a tightly folded sheet of paper presented in a box, through which a tapered hole has been burned with a steel cone. Once unfolded, the sheet reveals 64 holes all created by the same act, each of an incrementally different size.
The ideas expressed in Terauchi’s artist’s books have been borne out in grander arenas through her concurrent sculptural practice, represented here through a number of photographs. One of these shows a blown-up version of Ebb & Flow installed at Galerie Hoffmann in Friedberg in 1991, the sheet of torn paper splayed around wooden stakes. One is Many Many is One, from the 2024 Busan Biennale, consists of a huge red paper scroll stretched around the inside corner of a gallery wall, featuring a wavy line of holes created by cutting a single cone-shape into the rolled-up paper, à la that little Coracle book-work.
This compact but delightful show is rounded off with a group publication, Tongue & Groove (1983), and ephemera such an exhibition invitation, letters, and notes. What is so edifying about Terauchi’s work, on this evidence, is that it does not relegate the artist’s book to a twee miniaturization of sculptural form; instead, it uses the medium to establish modes of temporal and visual patterning that inform larger, three-dimensional pieces, which nonetheless retain some vestigial spirit of the book.
