Dream houses
Yukihiro Akama’s extraordinary, tiny wooden sculptures blur the lines between fantasy and reality
Yukihiro Akama has always loved wood. As a child, living in Miyagi Prefecture in the north of Honshu, Japan’s main island, he would walk in the pine and cedar woods with his father, foraging for mushrooms and berries. As a student of architecture and landscape design, and a self-confessed hippie, he focused his work around the properties and possibilities of bamboo. And, since graduation, wood has formed the core of a career that has spanned carpentry, house building and design, a spell as a lumberjack, and now art – as a designer and maker of miniature houses, which are at the same time both comfortingly familiar and unsettlingly strange. The same could perhaps be said of Yukihiro’s current situation. On the one hand, he lives in Huddersfield with his wife Ryoko and two children, goes out to work (he works on his sculptures early in the morning and late into the night) and bakes sourdough whenever he can. But he never planned to be here. It was only after the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 that the family, then living just 50km from the reactor, fled to England, where Ryoko had previously lived. “It was a big change, especially for me,” says Yukihiro, with typical understatement. “I thought I could understand English before we came here.”
The language barrier meant Yukihiro struggled to find work as a designer or joiner, until he met Samantha Allan, founder and curator of The Shop Floor Project in
Often I find the house in the wood. The grains and the knots show me where to cut
I think what I’m trying to do is to design something that could potentially exist, but doesn’t; something a bit in between
Ulverston at an arts festival. “We got talking about architecture and I told her about a traditional timber and mud store house I’d built for my mother’s gardening tools,” says Yukihiro. When Sam suggested he make some small houses for an exhibition of Japanese artists she had coming up, Yukihiro was unsure. “I felt that the creative part of my brain had turned off,” he says. “But then I found a block of wood in the garden when I was cutting weeds so I thought I’d try.”
His first series sold out in days, and since then he has made countless more in his garden studio. Inspiration could come from anywhere – barns, smokehouses, chimneys and water towers have all sparked collections, all chiselled from a single block of wood, mostly oak, and most of them offcuts from a furniture-maker friend. Sometimes he starts with a sketch but not always: “Often I find the house in the wood,” he says. “The grains and the knots show me where to cut.” Some, like his rocking or river house series, sit on platforms; many more teeter on stilts, themselves often inspired by the shapes of tree trunks. Some have walls blackened with fire or daubed with clay gathered in the local woods with his children, others he decorates with tiny pebbles. All seem to have stories to tell.
Aside from his evident pleasure in being creative again, the joy for Yukihiro lies largely in what those stories could be. “Some people tell me they expect the houses to move or talk, others that they imagine sitting on the veranda and holidaying there. I think what
I’m trying to do is to design something that could potentially exist, but doesn’t; something a bit in between.” Or, to put it another way, something that makes you wonder – and that they certainly do, in both senses of the word.
USEFUL INFORMATION
Yukihiro’s miniature houses are available to buy or commission through The Shop Floor Project. Tel 01229 584537, theshopfloorproject.com
You can also find out more about his work at yukihiroakama.wixsite.com
Some people tell me they expect the houses to move or talk, others that they imagine sitting on the veranda