Randy Takaki

Randy Takaki’s sculptures were powerful and mysterious.

 

Over the years he lived in Volcano, Takaki made nearly 6,000 of them, all similar in a way but no two exactly alike. Variously described as guardians, wood spirits or monks, almost all of his works were elongated stick figures with human heads and hunched shoulders made of wood, stone and sometimes chicken wire he found, scrounged and bought. They varied in size from a few inches to over 10 feet tall and invariably invoked something both human and spiritual,  a reverence for life itself.

“His goal was to do ten thousand of these guardians, or monks,” his friend and fellow sculptor Glenn Yamanoha told a reporter after hearing of Takaki’s death in 2016. “The last I talked to him, which was a couple days before he passed, he had done five thousand eight hundred something, like that.”

After moving from Honolulu, Takaki worked for years out of a garage-like studio  made of rusted corrugated metal siding with a moss-covered metal roof along Old Volcano Road. Inside the studio, his figures lined every wall, giving it the feel of a well-worn temple of art.

“When I looked at figures, it felt as if everything fell away from me: any idea of myself, why I was standing there, what I was supposed to be doing with myself or with my body. Tears started flowing. I felt grief, love, undoing. Yes, it was an undoing, and it was holy,”  a visiting artist, Lisa Mauer Elliott, wrote several years after seeing the works in the studio. “It was an encounter with the sacred; like walking around as a soul.”