Tomoko Takahashi - Hales Gallery

When arriving at the private view for Tomoko Takahashi show, I was met by a long queue. I overheard that the work had to be viewed, curiously, by torchlight.

I had the opportunity of meeting Tomoko, last year at the Drawing Power event on Exhibition Road. Tomoko was extremely happy, enthusiastic and down to earth; it was a refreshing change to the pretentious cool of some artists.

When we finally came to the front of the queue the hand drawn wall map showing our route through the gallery was explained to us, and we were handed a wind-up torch. The best thing about seeing the collection of stuff arranged on the floor and the walls by torchlight was that we only saw a partial view, never the totality of the room. I found myself coming across collections and groupings of things. It reminded me of the viewfinder that I had to look through, at school art lessons, and only draw what was contained within the frame. We shared the torch between us, and we would intern look at from the perspective of each other; things I liked and things my friend liked. It reminded me of the adventurous dreams I had as a child coming across hoards of treasure in some dark catacomb. Though it initially looked like a collection of the leftovers from a jumble sale, without the clothes, motifs were repeated; arrangements of things clearly became a Tomoko arrangement, the deleted clocks, and the playing cards for example.

In the next room, this time fully lit, there was a catwalk along the centre and around on the floor were all her documentation, in boxes and photographs upside down covering the floor. On the walls were photographs of her work, but stapled and bent, curved, not flat and displayed in a conventional manner. With my own work I find the relationship between the work and the documentation, a curious problem.

We returned to the dark room and negotiated our way through to the next room on our journey through the Hales Gallery. In this room, where framed photographs of the floor, very beautiful multiple exposures, appropriately framed, simple. We then walked through the final room, the Hales Gallery office. Like Takahashi herself, her practice, and the gallery were completely open and uninhibited.