It is said that people of old likened sequences of stars to something and read scenes from myths in them. Stars that are lined up purely by chance come to look like something, and from there a story begins. Isn't it the same idea as when you're walking along and a cloud suddenly looks like a face...? I think that leaping suddenly from the everyday into the extraordinary is something very familiar and easy. And then coming back again, and then again... going back and forth like that. I always think I will try to make such moments into pictures. By taking as motifs the constellation charts that have been handed down through history from ancient times to the present, I thought it might be possible to become aware that there truly are connections between the everyday and the extraordinary, and stories born of chance events. That is the series 「A stellar hill ―星の丘―」. It may be just a made-up story, but the stars really are there, and apparently almost every country has a place name meaning 'star hill'. (laughs) An ordinary grandma like you'd find anywhere flying through the sky, a child swallowing a snake, a baby born after ten years: there are lots of stories where you can't tell where the dream ends and reality begins, and this is one of them. Reika Nakayama