From 1 November 2012 to 31 October 2013, the Japanese artist Tomoko Tabuchi chose 12 photographs a day to represent her life.
A graduate of University College of Art in Japan, and the Edinburgh College of Art here, Tabuchi had been resident in Edinburgh for nearly 10 years by the time she began this project. She concentrated on the mundane and the ephemeral in consciously careless compositions.
She printed her photographs in grainy resolution, and mounted them on concertina-ed cards which wrap in on themsleves like matchbooks.
Each little tome she then dated in identical format, and stored in a bespoke box she had made herself to contain these precise contents exactly.
The result – an immaculately planned and executed Obsessive Life Log – is now on display in McNaughtan's Bookshop on Haddington Place. Visitors are welcome to pick up and browse among its volumes, each of which can be bought for £10.
I loved every detail of this micro-exhibition, from the simple setting in a white-walled room to its consistent indexing and the accuracy with which each booklet is crafted.
I loved too the contradictory pulls of repeated form and serendipitous content. Some visual themes recur: the view from a window, the mise en place of kitchen utensils and ingredients, a computer screen, the assembling of previous booklets, empty shoes. Many others are either uninterpretable abstracts or apparently spontaneous observations: the traces in cups and cleared plates, the curl of fingers on telephones, laundry, light on glass.
Tabuchi's life log curiously records what she describes as the 'beauty of ordinary life and fleeting moments' – that 99 per cent of every person's experience, 99 per cent of which we delete from memory. And in a modest way it also celebrates the humanity of the observer: her gradual changing, ageing, evanescence in a routinised but unstable world.
Meshed in dates, the work contemplates an alternative to the mainstream of history. The day after a terrorist outrage in London, for example, was one of headline horrors around the world. And in Tabuchi's complementary unfolding of events, it was equally a day of sunshine and showers in Edinburgh, of cutting card, of meals prepared for families, of raindrops and spiders on windows.
One of these narrative flows dominates the news and our view of our times. But both are true. Both run to the sea.
This project is also about creative projection and, as in its images of its own previous images, about self-haunting:
'Then, the process of editing photographs and making books was so important to me because while making them, with each photograph I recalled a sense of past memories and I felt as if I was talking to myself in the past. This project has become a source of my constant inspiration for new ideas.'
I find Tomoko Tabuchi's stoicism, her focal length, her capacity to find and relish the overlooked, refreshing. Intimate, self-effacing, dull and extraordinary – her work addresses profound questions with consummate economy. AM
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