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Andrew Binkley: Letting Go

noe tanigawa
noe tanigawa

People gravitate to AndrewBinkley’s “Stone Cloud” at Foster Garden.  Part of the Honolulu Biennial, it is big, and looks quite heavy, hovering over the heads of those who wander by.  HPR’s Noe Tanigawa caught up with Binkley there in the Garden to find out what he had in mind.

noe tanigawa
Credit noe tanigawa
Andrew Binkley, pictured with his Stone Cloud. Binkley's work explores the processes of awakening and letting go.

The Honolulu Biennial presents Andrew Binkley’s “Stone Cloud,” along with four other installations now at Foster Garden.  The Biennial continues at nine locations in Honolulu through May 8, 2017.  

It was pure serendipity to come across Andrew Binkley, in a cloud shirt, there under his super fun Stone Cloud.

“This piece is an inflatable boulder that’s basically suspended in the air.  It’s kind of transcending or rising above the ground level.  A lot of my work lately has been about transcendence and letting go, the sense of floating that comes from letting go.  I’ve been fascinated with all these stages towards letting go, and I feel maybe now that’s kind of self-reflective of a place that I’m at, of just drifting, becoming like a cloud, drifting around.”

Binkley, an ordained Buddhist monk, has been fascinated with the stages towards letting go.

A felicitous start here, next to the Buddha.

“I saw kind of a relationship too, almost like a meditator, still like a stone, like a mountain but breathing, or empty.  Solid but empty and transcending.”

“It’s nice to be in this environment too.  there’s a relationship with it, with the wind, the birds, even these flowers, the trees that it’s under?  There’s these beautiful pink flowers that keep falling.  But I love how they’re in the sky.  You look up and you see the clouds and you see these flowers then they fall like a stone, they even sound like it, whppp, one just fell!”

One hit me on the nose yesterday.

noe tanigawa
Credit noe tanigawa
The Stone Cloud at Foster Gardens, April, 2017.

“Ok, good.  Wake you up.  And then here they are,  all around on the stones too, so to me there’s an interesting relationship, of an impermanence and the beauty of it and appreciating that fragility and how things change. So the whole environment is a part of it as well, not separate, you know?...”

Lotta stuff you really don’t want to put words to.  It’s nice to have an image.

Noe Tanigawa covered art, culture and ideas for two decades at Hawaiʻi Public Radio.
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