Daijuzu, Large Concrete Prayer Beads

Following from our design of Buddhist prayer beads using the waste material of broken toys discarded by our children, Kyoko Hashimoto and I were commissioned by JamFactory to create a new work for their exhibition CONCRETE: art design architecture, the fourth in their series of material-focussed touring exhibitions. I was also invited to write an article for the catalogue, however this was rejected for being too critical, in regard to the concrete industry sponsorship of the exhibition. That essay is now published here. I have been working with, researching and writing about concrete now for 5 years. The complacency with which the concrete industry neglects the most damaging environmental effects of their product continues to shock and appall me. Though the greenhouse gas emissions of making concrete and the poor durability of steel-reinforced concrete has been known for some time among specialists, the recent media attention to concrete’s broad environmental impact has helped expand the public’s knowledge and interest. I have no doubt the indiscriminate use of steel-reinforced concrete is one of the key existential threats facing humanity. In this work, Hashimoto and I hope to convey an impression of this threat, affectively, through the typology of the Japanese prayer bead, or juzu, scaled up to reflect the giant size of the material’s industry and use: daijuzu. Over years and decades, the protruding steel rebar will crack and break open the concrete beads, destroying the necklace, just as the rebar will do in all our steel-reinforced buildings, ultimately.

This work is viewable in JamFactory’s CONCRETE: art design architecture between 1 March – 28 April, curated by Brian Parkes and Margaret Hancock Davis. Subsequently the work will tour with the exhibition around Australia.

Last week I was invited to speak about concrete on the ABC Radio National’s Blueprint for Living, which you can download here (my interview begins at 16:45). This Saturday 23rd of March I will be speaking on a panel about Concrete at UniSA in Adelaide nearby to the CONCRETE exhibition – details and registration are here.

Photography by Romon Yang.