Free-Spirited Sculptor Nobi Creates Art and Shelter in Her Adobe on Campus of CalArts : Fired Imagination

She’s a footloose, philosophical wisp of an artist in tattered jeans and T-shirt. She wanders the world greeting each day with a spontaneous smile and toils with the earth till dusk.

She came from Germany, by way of her home in Japan, crossing Tibet and China, traveling by rail and boat and bus--by airplane when she had no other way.

She’s landed in Valencia.

She’s called Nobi, which means “field and fire” in Japanese. And wherever she goes, Nobuho Nagasawa renews the primitive spirit of earth and fire.

Native-Clay Sculptures

The 27-year-old art student has built six earthworks, mound-like sculptures formed of native clay, that are left to be completed by the whim of erosion.

“My intention is not to sculpt a permanent sculpture,” she said. “If the sculpture returns to the earth in a couple of years, the project is over.”

Nobi is building her seventh and most ambitious project, titled “Earthwork Process 7,” in a windy corner of the athletic field at California Institute of the Arts.

After four months of labor, fraught with obstacles and one serious accident, it stands nearly finished, a vertical promontory of adobe, 22 feet high, 16 feet wide at the base, surrounded by great piles of lumber that Nobi has collected.

All that is left to do is construct the down-draft flue, glaze the interior and light the fire.

It must burn day and night for four days to fuse the adobe brick and mortar into a monolithic structure that can withstand rain for 20 years or more.

This will be Nobi’s most enduring earthwork, an adobe sculpture that will linger as a shelter, a place for reflection and meditation, even as a performance hall.

If all goes as planned, its first formal use will be as the location for a concert by Nobi and a friend on large clay drums that they will fire along with the house.

She intends for it to be a gathering place. “Any people can come and stay here,” Nobi said. “I might be living here during the summer.”

“Earthwork Process 7” embodies historic, artistic and cultural themes that Nobi has been collecting since she went on a school field trip to a prehistoric house in Japan.

“I found this old pottery, and I found the fingerprint of an ancient person,” she said. “I felt I was communicating with ancient people. That’s the first time I felt I was fascinated with earth.”

She built her first earthwork, a pock-marked wall of earth, in a Japanese fishing village.

“The local people there came by and helped,” she said.

The idea of building an earthwork that can be occupied came from observations of earthen homes in India, Pakistan and Tibet as she took the long way to Valencia on an exchange fellowship from the West Berlin university where she studied.

“Beautiful adobe houses. It’s a low-cost material. It’s just a beautiful thing,” she said.

The idea matured after teachers at CalArts introduced Nobi to Iranian architect Nader Khalili of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica.

Khalili, a visionary of low-cost housing for arid regions, developed a technique he called Geltftan--Iranian for “firing clay”--to fire adobe structures from within to harden the plentiful building material against its principal enemy, the weather.

To advance his theory, Khalili is building two villages of Geltftan houses, one in the southern San Joaquin Valley and the other on a Navajo reservation in Arizona.

Technical Advice

One of his students, a young Navajo named Tsosie Van Tsinhnahjinnie, volunteered as Nobi’s technical adviser, instructing her on loads, compression strength and firing technique for maximum strength.

Nobi obtained backing of about $1,000 through CalArts and bought unfired bricks. She also got permission to take earth for mortar from nearby hills.

“It’s just earth,” she said. “If I go there and shovel it myself, it’s free. It’s like a donation.”

She mixes it with a setting material for strength.

Work began Jan. 21. The first problem occurred when Nobi learned that she should drill short holes in the bricks to increase the strength of the structure.

Six thousand bricks at eight holes per side added up to a major amount of manual labor.

Volunteer Helpers

As it always has, help arrived.

A theater-lighting student named Van Harding pitched in.

“If I can just drill a couple hundred bricks a day and shuffle stuff, then she can be laying bricks,” Harding said.

Then Steve Laufer, who owns a Los Angeles business that sells tofu chili, became aware of the project on a trip to the campus to hear a friend in recital on the tabla, an Indian drum. The project captivated him.

“It’s just the most organic shape I’ve seen in a long time,” he said.

A third man, Kevin Boog, who works for a movie set builder, joined in, coming from home in Los Angeles on off-hours.

“It’s neat,” Boog said. “I just love the texture of it. When I saw it, I was very intrigued by it. After I talked to her, I got even more excited.”

Nobi definitely has infectious qualities, which come out in a constant commentary on her work and art.

Close and Gritty

She believes, for example, that work should be close to the earth and gritty.

“They tell me I should wear gloves,” she said. “But I don’t feel with the gloves. I need to feel the earth. I usually mix the mud with my feet because that gives me the feel of the earth.

“It’s just so nice to work outside,” she said. “In the evening, when I hear crickets, I know it’s going to rain. I never need a Walkman because I have the wind and the rain and the crickets to tell me when it’s going to rain.”

And she believes that art should be spontaneous.

“I don’t want it to be perfect,” she said. “It shows how I move. It’s my whole body. I’m not a mason. I want to be free. It’s more like a living thing.”

The project hasn’t been all transcendental fun, however.

Struck by Scaffolding

A month ago, while Nobi worked alone trying to secure a protective tarp to a scaffolding, a gust of wind caught the tarp like a sail. She was hit by the scaffolding and knocked unconscious.

Doctors at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital advised her not to work for two weeks.

“I was sitting in the wheelchair for a while, but I just couldn’t relax because I knew I had to finish this,” she said.

She resumed work two days later.

Now, she’s almost done. Firing is scheduled to begin Thursday.

The only problem remaining is wood. After visiting building sites, land-clearance jobs and abandoned scrap heaps, and scavenging through old wooden props from the CalArts theater department, she has only enough wood to burn two of the four days required for enduring strength.

If she doesn’t find wood for the other two days’ firing, the earthwork could erode in less than 20 years.

Nobi doesn’t worry.

Though she has built her first home, it is for others, not for her.

‘Snails Are Never Homeless’

“I myself am homeless because I don’t know where I am going after,” she said. “I don’t want to be attached anyplace. Sometimes I wish I were a snail because they carry their own house and they are never homeless.”

With her project ending, her money running out and her visa about to expire, Nobi again faces a future on the road.

She’d like to linger in Los Angeles but doesn’t know how she will support herself. She can’t muster a commercial motive for her work.

“I’d rather wash dishes than make a small sculpture for the gallery,” she said.

So she may be moving on. She won’t really be homeless. She’ll always have a home underfoot.

“I don’t know where my eighth earthwork is going to be or what it is going to be,” she said. “But wherever they have good earth, I’ll be there.”