Archaelogist Justin Dunnavant in conversation with Tomoya Matsuzaki upon the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition opening at Adams and Ollman, October 2026

Tomoya Matsuzaki and Justin Dunnavant over zoom

Justin Dunnavant: I saw your work at Felix Art Fair in LA, and I recognized some of the objects—particularly the smoking pipes and glass, because we date those in the archaeological record. I knew they were coming from 19th-century Europe, particularly England. We find a lot of them in the Caribbean, so it was interesting to see them in your work.

I asked who the artist was and what the archaeological connection might be.

Tomoya Matsuzaki: Those pipes were kind of the starting point for me, and for my mudlarking practice. I've been in London for almost 30 years. I came in 1997, when I was 20, with no real plan. I ended up going to art college and just stayed.

About fifteen years ago, I was walking along the River Thames with a friend at low tide. He picked something out of the riverbed and asked if I knew what it was. I thought it was a piece of bone. He said, "this is a clay pipe"—from before rolling-paper tobacco, when people smoked this way. That was the moment my attention was drawn to it. It brought to mind a whole scene of London two hundred years ago—something that felt very unfamiliar to me, which is what pulled me in.


Tomoya Matsuzaki in his studio, East London, September 2026. Photo: Alastair Levy.

JD: So it was really the pipe that started the bigger conversation around placemaking, history, and identity. You were 20 when you first came to London?

TM: Yes. I'd finished high school in Japan and then spent a year saving money for the trip. This was the late nineties, before the internet, so traveling was really the only way to experience another place. I came to Europe, and needed work almost immediately, so I started asking restaurants around London if they had anything. That was my introduction to the city.

JD: That restaurant connection is interesting, because I also wanted to ask about the culinary side of your practice—the recipes, alongside the recipes you use for pigments.

TM: It's all connected, and it developed slowly. In 2017, I reached the point of having lived in London for twenty years—exactly half my life, at that point, split between Japan and Britain. I realized I didn't have a plan to go back, so I was going to keep living here. That made me start thinking more about the place I lived in and how I saw things differently from my British friends.

Part of being an artist is finding your own language, your own way of seeing. So I started paying attention to small things—even just, "what is this tree in front of my house?" That led me into foraging: plants that are common here but not in Japan, and vice versa—plants that are symbolic of a season in one culture but unknown in the other. I like cooking, my wife and I cook a lot, so it felt natural to fold that into the work as a lighter kind of project.

JD: That's an important, often overlooked part of place and identity—especially when travel makes everything feel so transient. We tend to focus on the built environment and forget that plants and trees were often intentionally placed, and they carry their own history. That's part of what draws me to your recent work—you see the human-made objects at the base of the paintings, but then the natural world comes through in the pigments themselves. It's a full conversation between the natural and the built.

TM: Absolutely. The clay pipe itself is interesting that way too—I introduced clay pipes to friends back in Japan. I make zines about my everyday, and I wrote about finding these in a communal garden. A friend of mine later saw the same type of pipe displayed in a museum in Sri Lanka—evidence of the old trading relationship between India and England. That culture, and that object, traveled and got treated completely differently in a different place.

JD: Ceramics and clay pipes really speak to the globalization happening from the 16th through the 19th century—tobacco coming from the Americas, pipes manufactured in Europe, then shipped worldwide. It was practically one of the first international drug trades, since people became addicted to tobacco.

TM: So many places in one object.

JD: Exactly.

TM: I actually just found something similar outside my studio recently—a disposable vape. Same activity, different object. People smoke something and toss it on the street. Maybe two hundred years from now someone will find it and treat it the same way we treat these pipes.

JD: I'm curious about the mudlarking itself. The Thames is the obvious site, but  are you finding yourself foraging or mudlarking in other environments too, or is it mostly river-based?

TM: I collect things from everywhere, really. It’s quite connected to my daily life. I might find something on my way to the studio or on my way to work, so it’s not really a separate activity for me. It’s just part of how I move around and notice things. I get more excited around the river or the seaside than just on the streets, though. Mudlarking on the Thames became more restricted as it became much more popular during Covid, and the foreshore is a sensitive environment, so I still do some mudlarking, but I choose areas where I’m allowed to do it.

Bascule (solstice), 2026, oil on acrylic resin, aluminium and mudlarking finds, 149 × 208 × 8 cm.

But thinking about what to talk about today made me reflect on this: archaeology and my practice have a similar activity—collecting, excavating, gathering objects from the past. But I think what interests me most isn't the object's history so much as the moment of encountering it. Sometimes I find something and I have no idea what it is—it might not even be old, maybe just from last year—but the shape attracts me, so I keep it. I'm drawn to that moment of encounter, of being pulled toward something for a reason I can't quite explain. The object becomes evidence that I was there, at that time—a kind of presence. I do look into the facts afterward—what year a pipe was made, where—but that's secondary. The finding moment is my real focus.

Part of being an artist is finding your own language, your own way of seeing. So I started paying attention to small things—even just, "what is this tree in front of my house?" That led me into foraging: plants that are common here but not in Japan, and vice versa—plants that are symbolic of a season in one culture but unknown in the other.

JD: Part of why I engage with art so much is because I see the limitations of archaeology as an academic practice—it's often looking for scientific interpretation, quantifying things and putting them into historical context. But that point of encounter you're describing gets disregarded. I think these objects act as intermediaries between an ancestral past and the contemporary moment. When I excavate a site, I'm literally bringing something from the past into the present—and understanding what that does for a community that either forgot or needs to remember feels more important than understanding exactly how someone used it centuries ago.

TM: I've never worked on an archaeological site—could you tell me about it?

JD: We've been working in the Caribbean for about seven years, mainly excavating a Danish plantation in the Virgin Islands, trying to understand what life was like for enslaved Africans under Danish colonialism. That question shaped where we looked—we located the plantation, then the place where enslaved people actually lived, and dug in and around their homes.

Sometimes we find nothing but soil and plant remains. Sometimes we hit a prepared floor with smoking pipes from Europe, ceramics from France—evidence of exchange. And sometimes we find more recent things—we once found a glass marble and realized people were living there as recently as thirty or forty years ago. We bring objects like that back into the community, and people tell us stories—like remembering getting in trouble as kids for breaking glass soda bottles to get the marble inside to play with.

That's what I find powerful: one forgotten object in the ground can rekindle a positive memory for an elder. It complicates the idea of the past simply affecting the future—on a metaphysical level, time becomes transient. We can bring the past into the present, and the present into the past.


Shell, Brighton and Hove.

TM: I think about time in a similar way—using objects from the past, finding them, and making something that carries forward into the future.

JD: Thinking about your work, I think diaspora comes through a lot, this question of being Japanese and living in the UK. Since you're bringing in early British historical objects, I wonder what it would mean to put two cultures in conversation at a time when they weren't actually in contact—16th-century British objects alongside 16th-century Japanese objects, facilitating an ancestral conversation across time.

TM: I've never done this kind of mudlarking in Japan. When I went back for a few weeks and looked, I couldn't really find anything—Japanese streets are kept so clean. I have read about pottery shards being found at old ceramic-production sites, so people do still find things there. But I’d never really thought about putting British and Japanese objects together in that way. There wasn’t really a direct connection between Britain and Japan at that time, so, yeah, I think putting things from the two places together and creating a kind of conversation across time is quite interesting.

JD: It's fascinating, since they're both island nations. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of discarded material in Japan just ended up in the ocean rather than on land.

TM: I'm sure that's true. That's something I'd like to explore in Japan eventually.

JD: You mentioned seaweed too…

TM: Right—that came out of foraging and paying more attention to the British landscape and culture. I started wondering about how Japan and Britain are both island countries, but the way their seafood cultures developed is quite different. I eventually found out about laverbread in Wales, a traditional Welsh food made from seaweed, and that really surprised me, because I hadn’t realised seaweed was part of traditional British food culture.

And then I came across this amazing story about Kathleen Drew-Baker, a British researcher who was studying a type of red seaweed in Wales in the late 1940s. She discovered an important part of its life cycle, and her research helped Japanese scientists develop a way to cultivate nori, the dried seaweed sheets we use in Japanese cooking. This was particularly important for the nori industry around the Ariake Sea. I found it quite amazing that something so essential to Japanese cuisine was helped by research from a British scientist.

JD: I never would have imagined that connection either—that information traveled and helped develop something I always assumed was just naturally abundant in Japan. I also wanted to ask about music in your work.

TM: Music, for me, is about mood—keeping myself in one direction, feeling secure. It's not all logical; the environment—light, temperature, humidity, how your body feels—really influences how you see things, which affects what you make. Music is part of that.

JD: I was talking with another artist friend recently, and—this is probably reductionist—but the art that resonates most with me tends to deal with feeling or memory. Those are the two things that really draw a viewer in. It's interesting that music helps you hold onto a feeling, because it clearly comes through in the work. 

TM: Exactly—and memory does a lot too. Here in Britain, I'm always looking for ingredients that feel familiar, that I can relax with, but I can't always find the exact things from home. So my wife and I are constantly looking for substitutes—similar taste, flavor, or texture—which ends up creating a kind of new recipe. That says a lot about identity, place, and how memory is carried physically—your body remembers things, and doing them naturally makes you feel more attached to a place.

JD: I'm curious about your canvases—you build up and layer materials before painting, rather than using a standard stretched canvas. How did that develop?

TM: I used to make paintings on canvas in the usual way. At some point I questioned that—you learn to stretch a canvas the first week of art school, and after that there's no more question about it. But if you want to draw or paint, you can do it on anything.

I had a plaster slab sitting in my studio by chance, broken a bit at the edge, and I liked that texture—the physicality of it. It bridges the pictorial space of a painting—where your eye is drawn into a depicted depth—with the fact that it's also just a physical object hanging in front of you. That's what I find amazing about painting: it can be both things at once. So I try to hold that balance—when you look at the painting, you're not sure if you're looking at the depicted image or the material itself, or even, when you look closely, whether it’s the action of the brush marks or just the colour.

I think about colour as a material. In another series of works, I make ink out of things I find, like flower petals and bits of scrap metal. This morning I picked some Buddleia, which grows everywhere in Britain this time of year, in forgotten spaces like car parks and hedgerows. I also collected old copper coins people don't bother picking up anymore, put them in vinegar to develop a color, and made a drawing with it today.

[Shows a drawing on screen.]

JD: That's amazing.

TM: Just for fun—art-making should be exciting and playful.

But I think what interests me most isn't the object's history so much as the moment of encountering it. Sometimes I find something and I have no idea what it is—it might not even be old, maybe just from last year—but the shape attracts me, so I keep it. I'm drawn to that moment of encounter, of being pulled toward something for a reason I can't quite explain. The object becomes evidence that I was there, at that time—a kind of presence.

TM: How did you get into archaeology in the first place? Was identity and place always the driving interest, or did that come later?

JD: I initially got into it because I liked to travel and was interested in history. In school, you're taught that everything that's happened is already written down somewhere, and all you can do is reinterpret it. But once I started doing archaeology, I realized how much has actually been forgotten or simply isn't known—particularly around African diaspora and slavery. A lot of that history was never written down, so archaeology became a way to bring it out with a new method.

That purpose guided most of my work for a long time. But about five years ago, I realized I needed to get more personal with the work—to understand who I am and where I come from in order to know what the next project should be. That crystallized while I was excavating a slave ship in Alabama, when my mother texted to tell me my grandfather was buried in that same state—a couple hundred miles away, and I'd had no idea.

Being in Los Angeles now, with students from all kinds of backgrounds—the Philippines, Central America—made me realize my goal is to make the work personal enough that people from other cultures can find what resonates for them and apply that same approach to their own work. I can teach anyone to excavate, map, and interpret—but understanding why you're doing the work is what makes your interpretation different from anyone else's. There's an element of self-discovery that's become central to it.

TM: That resonates with me.I'm interested in the person doing it, what motivates them, and why they are curious about what they find. I think those things are just as interesting to me as the discovery itself.

JD: We do get people who treat it like solving a puzzle—just interested in finding things, or history in general. But when you dig deeper, it becomes more powerful—what we're actually trying to recover.

TM: What's it actually like, physically excavating and finding things? Do you enjoy that part?

JD: I like all of it. Sometimes it's shovels and trowels, sometimes clearing trees or brush just to access a site. But there's a real element of discovery—often we're the first people to encounter an object in two or three hundred years. It raises questions: what is this fragment, what was it attached to, how was it used? At the end of the day we debrief, since everyone's working different parts of the same site, and piece together each person's finds into a fuller story. I like that forced communication a lot.

TM: Have you ever found something and genuinely had no idea what it was?

JD: All the time—I've worked across Africa, the Caribbean, and underwater in the Pacific, and even ceramic types vary by region. In Ethiopia we found tiny bowls and couldn't figure out why anyone would eat from something so small—turned out they were for spices, not food. Those moments make you reconsider your own relationship to everyday objects you take for granted. There was also a candle-wick clipper—I'd never thought about how common those must have been when everyone used candles for light, but finding it in context makes total sense.

TM: Most of what I find mudlarking is just everyday, mundane stuff people threw in the river. What still excites me is not knowing what something is—once you know, like with clay pipes, the excitement fades a bit, since you can find dozens in five minutes. But that not-knowing is important, especially as an artist—trying to develop your own way of seeing means knowing what you know and what you don't.

JD: Living with an object also changes your relationship to it. A wine bottle held wine, but if you live with it for years, maybe you use it to hold water, or a candle, or bleach, or to water plants—all those uses let you reinterpret something otherwise mundane.

TM: Yes, I think that idea of unlearning is important in art too. You have to forget what you already know about something and look at it differently. I have things on my table that I can't find in Japan, like these rounded red bricks you find on European coastlines. There are also some rocks I collected in Italy—I almost lost interest in it there because I was surrounded by so many similar ones, but bringing it back here made it suddenly feel rare and particular.

JD: One thing I've been rethinking is how we catalog objects in archaeology—usually ceramics together, glass together, metal together, then quantified and written up separately. But especially with material from all over the world, like yours, what would it mean to catalog by place instead—glass next to rock next to ceramic, organized as a story or a geography rather than by type?
 
Found objects in the artist’s studio, East London, September 2026.

TM: That's actually pretty close to how I do it, more informally—everything used to just be a pile, but each object carries a specific memory: this is from Italy, this is from that summer. I clearly remember when and where I found those objects, and that’s an important part for me.

JD: That's what struck me about your work when I first saw it—a glass bottle next to ceramic next to a clay pipe, and I immediately wanted to know where the piece was made, because they likely all came from the same place. That memory or story matters more to me than how the object was manufactured.


TM: For me, found objects connect memories from the past with the memory of finding them. And where I make work really does affect what I make—which is relevant, because I'm actually planning to move back to Japan next year, to live.I think when the scenery changes, my way of seeing and making will naturally shift too.

JD: Where do you see the practice going, and what might you explore once you're there?

TM: The place we're planning to live is Dazaifu, in Fukuoka, which is near some major archaeological sites. It has a long history of connections and cultural exchange with other parts of East Asia, so I'm quite interested to see how being there might affect my work. I also want to keep that experience of Britain with me—the outsider way of questioning and noticing things. I want to keep doing that in Japan, though I don't yet know what I'll find.

TM: What are you working on right now?

Justin Dunnavant. Photo: Ryan Young.

JD: Two main projects. One is underwater—we've been searching for a shipwreck off the coast of Cuba for about four years now. Part of it is archival work: documents about the ship, who was attached to it, interviews. The other part is going to Cuba, trying to locate where it wrecked, talking to people there, and physically mapping the wreck. We have about four archaeologists working on it full time, plus specialists we bring in as needed—for instance, someone who knows early-20th-century wrecks well enough to tell us what a boiler of a certain size would have looked like.

The other project is in Morocco—completely different, looking at some of the earliest agriculture in the mountains of southern Morocco.

TM: What excites you most right now?

JD: Right now it's experimenting with how we present and interpret findings, not just excavate them. Most of our reports are very scientific and only reach specialists, or eventually a museum years later. I've been thinking about making figurines of early people we study, or scaled models of ships we're looking for—not for display, but for people to actually hold and play with. That's the most exciting piece to me now: taking very minute details and repackaging them so people ask basic questions—how big was the ship, how did it sail, how did it wreck, how do we find it?

Part of what we're trying to do is surface more obscure archival stories and bring them back into popular memory. One example—I worked with an artist to produce a run of fifty figurines of Matthew Henson, one of the first people to reach the North Pole. In researching him, I found he'd actually gone there partly to help extract a meteorite, which is now in the Museum of Natural History in New York. The idea was that something people see as a small tabletop object could spark a much deeper conversation. I think it matters more than the papers, because far more people will encounter the object than will ever read the report.

TM: That's exactly the kind of accessibility I think about too.

JD: That's part of why I've been spending so much time around artists and artwork—complex ideas can get compressed into a sculpture, a painting, an object, and then repackaged and distributed in a completely different way.

TM: Thank you so much—this was a great conversation.

JD: Likewise. I'll definitely be following your career and your work.

Dr. Justin Dunnavant holds the Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology at UCLA. His first book, Colonialism, Ecology and Slavery, under contract with Princeton University Press, investigates the relationship between ecology and enslavement in the former Danish West Indies. In addition to his archaeological research, Justin is co-founder of the Society of Black Archaeologists and an AAUS Scientific SCUBA Diver. In 2021, he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and inducted into The Explorers Club as one of “Fifty People Changing the World that You Need to Know About.” In 2022, he was awarded the Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence at Occidental College. His research has been featured on Netflix's "Explained," Hulu's "Your Attention Please" and in print in American Archaeology, Science Magazine, and National Geographic Magazine. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and the Aquatic Futures Foundation.

Tomoya Matsuzaki opens on October 3, 2026 at Adams and Ollman.