Shirobayashi’s stitch-bound book Ruminations begins and ends with the artist’s own words about space, memory, and the difference between erasure and absorption. Shirobayashi recalls their childhood practice of cyclically drawing and then erasing images that bothered them, hoping that this ritual would resolve the issue. Following this are photographs of chalkboards at all stages of use whose dark green contrasts with Shirobayashi’s faded images of the ocean, calm and mysterious in both their subject matter and presentation.
On the last page of Ruminations, Shirobayashi interprets their own work, situating chalkboards and landscapes as spaces of “emotional landscapes that carry my and other’s personal histories.” Through eraser marks and the passing of time, these spaces carry unseen memories, accessible only through an affective imagination of what may have come before.
