The wildLIFE Project
"Bell Shrine" continues Maruyama’s engagement with the poaching crisis through a work grounded in ritual and reflection. At its center, a cast bronze bell sounds at measured intervals, marking the ongoing loss of elephants to the ivory trade and transforming an abstract crisis into a felt, temporal experience.
The structure draws from the form of a traditional butsudan, a Buddhist altar used for remembrance—not only of the dead, but as a space for the living to contemplate the nature of existence. Within it, offerings of flowers, candlelight, and incense carry layered meaning. The flowers, in their fleeting beauty, speak to impermanence and the inevitability of loss. The candle represents illumination—the possibility of seeing clearly, of recognizing the conditions that give rise to suffering. The incense, as it burns and disperses into air, suggests transformation: the movement from form to absence, from presence to memory, and the unseen continuities that remain.
Together, these elements shift the work beyond memorial into meditation. The loss of elephants is not presented solely as data or distant tragedy, but as part of a larger reflection on fragility, interdependence, and the consequences of human action. Each sounding of the bell becomes an act of witness—marking not only lives taken, but the quiet unraveling of complex social worlds, and inviting a deeper awareness of what it means to lose, to remember, and to remain.