Sculpturing With Sound : Mineko Grimmer uses ice, pebbles and other materials to create works that are as pleasing to listen to as they are to look at.

If you own a Mineko Grimmer sculpture, you don’t just look at it. You listen to it, drain it and supply it with ice. It’s like being the host of a cocktail party, but a lot more meditative.

Grimmer sculptures are large-scale, avant-garde music boxes. Most take the form of a wooden tower with various sound-making materials--bamboo poles, pieces of metal, water pools, guitar strings and the like--embedded within. Suspended above the tower is a block of ice with several hundred pebbles frozen inside.

As the ice melts, the pebbles drop, hitting the sound makers at random.

“I call them ‘sound-producing kinetic sculptures,’ ” said the Japanese-born artist as she made final preparations in her studio for the debut of her latest work, “North American Woods Series.” “Then all the elements of my work are mentioned.”

The series is made up of six separate boxes, each with its own block of ice suspended above. They are nearly identical except that each is made of a different kind of wood--ash, walnut, southern red oak, red oak, poplar and bird’s-eye maple.

The boxes are on view in Santa Monica at the Koplin Gallery, which has a freezer on site to keep them supplied with ice, until Sept. 5.

Grimmer, 42, has been making these sculptures since 1980. To test one of the “North American Woods” boxes, she took an ice-pebble block from a freezer near the front door of the large, downtown studio. Carefully removing it from a pyramid-shaped mold, she carried the block past the industrial-sized, power wood-working machines in her shop to one of the boxes.

Each of the boxes was sanded to a fine sheen and then painted with a clear varnish. Inside each she placed three layers of material.

On the bottom she put a dark tray filled with water. In the middle went four tightly strung guitar strings. And on top she rigged a grid made of 30 pieces of slender black bamboo and one fatter piece in a lighter color.

“It usually takes about 30 minutes to start after I put on new ice,” said Grimmer as she hung the block on a white rope dangling about four inches above the box.

But the day was so warm the pebbles started to drop within five minutes. At first they came down one by one, rattling around the bamboo a couple times before dropping into the water. Occasionally one would hit a guitar string.

As time went on, the pebbles started to come down in small groups, making a jumble of sounds as they made their way through the box.

From outside the studio, located in a wholesaling and warehouse district adjacent to Little Tokyo, and several floors down came the sounds of trucks being unloaded, people shouting to each other and traffic rumbling by. But inside the studio it was serene as Grimmer and several visitors quietly waited between pebble drops and then listened intently for the sounds each made.

No two drops sounded the same, no two periods of silence between drops were equal in length.

“I thought at first, all those years ago, that I would get sick of this,” said Grimmer as she stood near the box, watching and listening. “But it is always different, always a nice sound.”

Her work grew out of her fascination with processes in nature. As a student in the 1970s at the Otis Art Institute, she did several projects for which she photographed natural phenomena over periods of time. “I was examining shadow changes, waves, wind projects,” she said. “It would take a lot of time.

“I wanted to find something that would change over a shorter period. I thought of ice.”

At first she photographed plain blocks of ice as they melted. Then she started to add pieces of broken glass, sand, metal and pebbles to the ice molds. “I noticed that when the pebbles dropped, they made a sound. But it was at random. I liked that.”

She worked on developing her sound-producing ice sculptures for about two years, first showing them in public in 1981 at an exhibition sponsored by the Japan America Community Culture Center downtown. It turned out to be a great occasion for a debut.

“Many dealers and other art people were there,” she said. “It gave me a lot of exposure right away. A man from Arco called me right after that and I did one for them.”

Grimmer has worked almost steadily ever since, creating the sculptures for various exhibits, commissions or private collectors. On several occasions, she has worked in collaborations with composers such as Carl Stone, Mamoru Fujieda and one of her longtime heroes, John Cage.

It’s no surprise that Grimmer and Cage are simpatico. Cage, now 79, has spent much of his life exploring chance and random sounds. He composed a solo violin piece, “ONE6” to be performed while one of her sculptures was making its own sounds. “I like her work very much, both that it looks so beautiful and is beautiful to listen to,” said Cage, speaking from his home in New York.

“My recent music is characterized by long, sustained sounds and so it goes beautifully with the short, percussive sounds of the stones against the metal or the wood or the water.”

“North American Woods” was born of Grimmer’s interest in domestic woods and her desire to get people to not take wood for granted. “The design of the boxes, the size, is the same,” Grimmer said. “Therefore people will notice the differences in color and texture. For example, ash and red oak have the same luminous quality and are similar in grain. But there is a very beautiful color contrast.”

Grimmer continues to receive commissions and grants, but most of the income she makes on her art is through the selling of the pieces. Each of the boxes in the “North American Woods Series” is priced at $8,000, which includes a ceiling mount for hanging the ice.

The income is not enough to completely sustain her art work, she said. Grimmer also teaches mathematics, Japanese and social studies at a Japanese school in West Los Angeles, “so I can pay for my studio.”

She has sold more than 20 of the sculptures, several of which went to such institutions and businesses as Security Pacific Bank, Peter Norton’s computer software firm and the Fresno Art Museum. Most have gone to private collectors.

Along with the sculpture, the buyer gets a few ice molds and a supply of pebbles. Grimmer also includes a few mock ice blocks made from clear resin and pebbles to hang over the sculpture when it is not in operation.

“A lot of people want them to work during parties or just at certain times,” Grimmer said. “When it is not working, they can use the resin. I call it faux -ice.”

Mineko Grimmer’s “North American Woods Series” is open from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, and from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturdays at Koplin Gallery, 1438 Ninth St., Santa Monica, through Sept. 5. Call (310) 319-9956.