Hideo Furuta

Published on Tuesday 18 December 2007 18:39

Japanese sculptor who made home in Galloway.

Born: 22 November, 1949, in Hiroshima, Japan.

Died: 5 November, 2007, in London, aged 57.

HIDEO Furuta was a remarkable man and an outstanding sculptor. No-one who knew him will soon forget his striking figure, lean and wiry with wild hair and beard, often dressed, no matter what the context, as though he had just emerged from the quarry where he regularly worked, hewing stone, all the hours of daylight, winter and summer.

If he did look wild, as soon as you spoke to him you felt his infectious warmth and charm. As you got to know him you learned to respect his transparent integrity and deep seriousness, but to understand, too, how that was always tempered by his humour and his generosity.

Born in 1949 in Hiroshima, Furuta studied art and philosophy and aesthetics there and in Tokyo. A crucial experience for him, however, was a year spent as a stonemason and quarryman in the Ishizaki quarry on Kurahashi Island, Japan. It was there that he learned to work granite, which became his chosen medium – quarries too seemed to become his natural habitat.

He also taught briefly in Japan before going to Chile in 1984, then coming to Britain in 1985, where he took a residency to create a sculpture at Builth Wells Comprehensive School in Wales. He then took various residencies and teaching positions in Wales and England and carried out several commissions in Wales and the south before coming to Scotland in 1989 to a residency at Edinburgh University.

Furuta made an immediate impact by setting up his studio in the open air in the back garden of what was then the fine art department in George Square. He would light a fire in the morning to temper his tools afresh each day and, incidentally it seemed, to cook his breakfast. After that he settled in Scotland.

The geology of the country, like that of Japan, is rich in granite. He became completely at home here, as a man and as an artist, so much so that he liked to joke that he and his son, Suguru, who joined him here as a boy, would be the first people to be naturalised in an independent Scotland. There would have been a nice symmetry in that. The last naturalised Scots before the Union of 1707 were also an artist and his son, Sir John Medina and his son, John.

In 1991, Furuta was sculptor in residence at Grizedale Forest and from 1992-94 was Henry Moore fellow in sculpture at Northumbria University.

He was offered a permanent post, but turned it down to return to sculpture full-time. He did, however, return to Newcastle as a visiting lecturer at Newcastle University in 1995.

No-one could charm support from even the most unpromising sponsors the way Furuta could. At one point, I found myself writing to a bank manager to vouch for the value of some drawings he was offering as collateral for a loan. He got the loan. More importantly, he persuaded Tarmac to give him the use of Kirkmabreck quarry, near Creetown in Galloway. He made his home there for many years, living in a dilapidated house that went with the quarry and working a seam of beautiful white granite. When Tarmac eventually asked him to move, with the support of the people of Creetown he found another disused quarry near Carsluith, which in turn became his base.

Furuta saw no boundaries between national cultures, but neither did he see boundaries between the various branches of culture itself. Granite is the most intractable material, but he used it to express his understanding of the essential community of ideas shared by art, music, philosophy and mathematics. He was a gifted musician and conversant with the deepest mysteries of mathematics. Stone for him was a living thing and his response to the elemental qualities of granite was elemental.

He most frequently worked with simple Euclidian shapes, spheres especially, but also cylinders, cones, pyramids and cubes (latterly he added low relief or inlaid figuration to the hewn surface of the stone) but his geometry was always intuitive. He produced granite spheres freehand, for instance, then composed them into complex compositions – a beautiful example is Position and Appearance, installed at Ardrossan Harbour in 2003 and consisting of 20 granite spheres of various sizes laid out on a chequerboard pavement. These compositions have the same imponderable rightness as the great Zen sand gardens of Japan. They were not made in imitation, however. They were Furuta's own deeply felt response to his sense that such rightness is not a casual thing, not somehow accidental, but that it reflects our intuition of a greater order whose logic is ultimately elusive, but which we also recognise in music and in mathematics.

Furuta came to be regarded with great affection in Galloway and he repaid this regard with one of the last of more than 40 public works he had carried out, the remodelling of Adamson Square in Creetown. It is a major project that he initiated and largely completed himself. It will now be his monument.