ΔS ≥ 0 [The Weight of a Second]
TOMOKO NAGAKAWA
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Tomoko Nagakawa’s new series considers time not as a steady measurement, but as something lived, elastic and unstable. While clocks move forward evenly, experience does not. Moments stretch, collapse, repeat and disappear, leaving memory to fragment while certain images or sensations remain strangely intact. Drawing on ideas of entropy and irreversibility, the work explores how time accumulates weight rather than length, how repetition and erasure can suspend it, and how a single second can hold more meaning than years. Through blur, layering and acts of making and unmaking, Nagakawa dwells in those dense points where time gathers instead of passing, asking what it is that truly endures, not because it lasts, but because it refuses to disappear.
“Time is not constant. While clocks advance evenly, lived time stretches and collapses, years passing unnoticed, a single second expanding beyond measure. ΔS ≥ 0 names this condition: the relentless progression, where each moment carries the accumulated weight of what cannot be undone.”
Across cultures and histories, stories return to this instability of time. In the Japanese folktale of Urashima Tarō, a fisherman returns home to find centuries have passed. Oisín leaves Ireland for what feels like a brief stay in Tír na nÓg, only to discover generations gone. Rip Van Winkle sleeps through the birth of a nation. In The Odyssey, time fractures between Odysseus and Penelope: his years collapse into a sequence of trials, while hers accumulate through waiting. By weaving each day and undoing her work each night, Penelope uses repetition and erasure to hold time in suspension as the world moves forward without her. These stories share a truth. Time is felt, not counted.
The work reflects entropy, ΔS ≥ 0, the irreversible movement toward disorder. Memory follows a similar path. As time advances, fragments scatter, yet certain moments resist decay, crystallizing into dense, enduring points. Through repetition, blur, and fragmentation, through acts of making and unmaking, my practice inhabits the single second capable of outweighing years of erosion.
What endures is not what lasts longest, but what refuses to disappear. As Alice in Wonderland reminds us, “Forever… sometimes is just one second. ” In that second, time does not pass. It gathers.
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Tomoko Nagakawa is represented in the UK by Open Doors Gallery
For all artwork enquiries
Contact | tom@opendoors.gallery
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