Memories of Tanna (2014), the first exhibition of the Cliff Edge Project, was held in the Tanna Basin. Through paintings, photographs, video, and collected materials, it addressed the Tanna Fault, the 1930 North Izu Earthquake, and the construction of the Tanna Tunnel underway directly beneath the basin. My relationships with friends living in Tanna and walking through the basin became the starting points for the research.

The exhibition brought together panoramic photographs of the basin, contour maps, records of fault displacement, interviews with earthquake survivors, archival photographs of the disaster and tunnel construction, a photographic map made through street observation, as well as jindai-sugi cedar and a wall clock from the Tanna Water Shortage Countermeasures Committee—materials carrying the history of life in the area. Here, a method took concrete form: walking the land, studying documents, listening to people, and allowing work to emerge from those encounters.

Decisive within this research was my encounter with the “fault mirror,” a phenomenon in which bedrock surfaces rub against one another during fault movement and become smooth like a mirror. Having worked with mirrors and mirror surfaces since my student years as devices that destabilize perception, I experienced this as the moment when the problem of the human-made mirror connected to geological time. The minimal wall I had initially conceived was also reconfigured through encounters with the fault, earthquake, tunnel, water shortages, and local testimony. Here, the order of making shifted—from bringing a work into a place to allowing the work itself to be transformed by the land.