Takashimaya 2009

An exhibition is generally the first place an artist sees their own works as a body. Most of the time we are focussing on individual parts of the process. Setting up the Takashimaya exhibition today was exciting, because most of the work, as you know, only came out of the kiln yesterday!

One of the things I like about the NY Takashimaya Home exhibition is the dining table setting, which really puts the pots in context as functional art.

Mixing the different patterns as a place setting, putting it together with other genre, cuttlery, crystal and laquer ware. It helps the guests to visuallise the work in their own home.

Of course I had to test drive the new coffee mugs with Mika this morning before I delivered the pots, with a nice cup of cappuccino, on our own dining table.

Opening the Box

No matter how cleverly you stack the kiln, or how well you have mastered the firing, the fact remains that the results from a wood kiln are in the hands of nature. You will never know for sure how the pots will come out until they do, actually, come out. It is a matter of faith, of trusting the process of nature. And if you have guided the firing well, the kiln will reward you with exceptional pots, far beyond the limits of your own ability.







My firing on Saturday took 13 hours, so it was fairly fast, but I gave it a very heavy reduction, including a reduced cooling. When I opened the kiln this morning I was surprised by a slightly metallic lustre on the surface of flashing and blue clouding in the black glaze. The pink spot on the rim of the plate is porcelain slip with 2% of Copper Oxide, so it is a good indication of the heavy reduction. In oxidation it would be green. The green slip trailing is also porcelain, but with 2% Chrome.






There was also more orange flashing towards the fire face than usual, which will balance with the heavy carbon trapping from the previous firing when I display them together at my next exhibition.










There were more losses than I've had recently, but that is mainly because of the large number of plates with the black glaze. Just one grain of sand or flake of kiln wash will ruin the whole piece.










Two hundred of the pieces from this firing will be going into my next exhibition and will be available for purchase at New York Takashimaya Home, 10F Takashimaya Department Store, Shinjuku, Tokyo, from next Wednesday, July 15th till July 28th.
I will be at the exhibition on the 15th, 18th, 19th, 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th, if you would like to visit while I am there.

How I Stack My Kiln

There are many people who have now built my kiln, and everyone will stack and fire it differently in order to achieve their desired result. Just for the record though, I wanted to show you how I stack my kiln and why.

Firstly, The brick arrangement under the shelves is designed to force the flame to the front of the kiln. The surface area of the space between the bricks is equal to the surface area of the flame inlet mouths at the back of the kiln which also equals the exit flue in the floor off the kiln. That means that the same amount of flame can come into the kiln, find its way through the work and exit the kiln. draft can then be controlled by the damper and the stoking volume and rate.




The first layer of shelves goes onto the bag wall right up to the fire face. There is a coil of wadding along the bag wall to stop the draft going straight under the first shelf. It forces the flame to go up first without taking short cuts.









There is a gap of 13cm on either side of the shelves. The pots can overhang this gap as much as you like, it won't affect the firing. You will notice how crusty the kiln is; that's because I've fired it 120 times over the last 10 years.









Between the shelves I leave 1.5cm of space only, this is part of the total exit space calculation.












It is important to stack this kiln tight. How tight? Tight as a salmons sphincter should do it. I only leave one or two milimetres of space between pots. Firing raw means the pots will shrink away from each other anyway, but it is also important to stack as tight as possible because the kiln is built of insulating brick and doesn't store a heat mass, so the work must become the heat mass.





I try to get as many pots as possible into the kiln. These cups have no glaze on them at all, I am relying on the wood effects to glaze them for me, the best place for them is at the fire face. Glazed work should be stacked at the front of the kiln away from the direct flame.









The handles force me to leave more space above the pots than I would like. Ideally the space should be about 1cm.











I stack right up to the arch, keeping it as tight as possible. There is plenty of space between the pots for the flame to get through, and as it does it leaves ash and vapour flashing. If there is too much space around, above or between the pots, the flame will rush straight past the pots and up the chimney, taking all its ash and vapour with it.







The front shelves go in with the same 1.5cm gap.
A long brick bridges the gap over the flue.

The front stack is also stacked tightly, with work that I would prefer less ash on, like the black glaze, or pots that I want more red or orange flashing rather than ash deposit.

This firing only used 40 kiln shelves, but the maximum I have used is 80, all plates. The tighter it is stacked, the better. It usually holds about 400 pieces per firing.

Fourth of July

An auspicious date to open a new chapter in my pottery adventure. Tomorrow sees my work available for sale in the USA for the first time!

I know there have been many people out there waiting for this to happen, particularly since the Ceramics Monthly feature. The truth is that I have been too busy here in Japan to pursue international galleries. (Which is also why I haven't written any blog entries recently, but that's another story!)

My good friend Gary Jacketti has recently opened a gallery, BEACON ART....SHORTWAVE GALLERY in Stone Harbour, New Jersey, and I have sent him a small selection of work, thirty pieces in total, including Tea Ceremony ware. Gary was involved with the early World Art Educators Workshops here in Mashiko, and is a highly accomplished sculptor and artist in his own right. I wish him all the best with his new gallery, and if you are in the area by all means drop in and check out the work!

Vanished

I spent hours last night writing an entry to create a word picture for you. It described my day in fine detail from the rising of the sun to laying down my head to rest. I hit the publish button and it vanished as completely as if it had never been. Only the first paragraph remained, truncated. I decided it was late and I would do best to sleep and rework it in the morning. It did make me laugh though.

We live our lives like that, we experience the world and engrave it in our hearts. No one can see the world as we do, feel our feelings or know all the moments of our souls. When the day, the hour, the instant is gone it remains only in our minds eye.

When I make pots, I give form to my feelings about those moments. I try to share the joy that I feel in living by creating vessels that will enrich other peoples moments. Long after my day is gone, those pots will continue to touch peoples lives and hopefully bring them happiness. I will not know. My own happiness is here today, every moment of my life. It is the sum of all that I have learned and have become through my experiences, and it is the gratitude I feel for the blessings that I have. It is not some distant destination, it is here and now for that is all any of us truly possess.

Imagination

The exhibition continues, with many friends and customers, old and new, sparing the time to visit me here and enjoy the new works. Alas and alack, I find myself bereft of the appropriate software to download any photos. On top of that, most of the best work is walking out the door before I can photograph it anyway!
So, without visuals, I will try to paint you a picture.
The morning light filters softly through the paper shoji screens, and I wake to an unfamiliar ceiling. It is covered with a layer of fine bamboo, darkened by charcoal fumes, completely unlike the ceiling of my bedroom at home (undressed cedar with a screw missing). I turn my leaden head to take in the rest of my surroundings, a tea room, a shelf of my tea bowls, tea caddies, water vessels and vases. A sign above me says in Japanese characters "帰庵”, Ki An, a tea room to come home to. I realize suddenly where I am, just feet away from the busiest street in Tokyo, 150 km from home, from Mika and the children, but safe at another sort of home. For nine days every year, for the last sixteen years, this has been my home.

Mingei

So much has happened I don't know where to begin.
I am sitting in the Ebiya Gallery in Nihombashi, it is late and all the guests have left after the opening party. This is my sixteenth exhibition here, and now I have the gallery to myself. The last few weeks/months have been so hectic I haven't had time to scratch myself. It is only after the exhibition begins that I can catch my breath. I will be here for a week, so each night I will try to catch up on one of the exciting episodes that have occupied my time.
For tonight I would like to just talk about mingei, as it has been featuring significantly in my recent endeavours. Having studied under Shimaoka sensei both his and mingei's influence are unavoidably entwined in my work and philosophy. There seems to have been a great deal of discussion about the meaning of mingei this year, particularly its definition and place in modern society. So, let's start from there.
Mingei is a word which was invented by Yanagi Soetsu in 1926. It is a contraction of the phrase "minshuteki kogei" , which has been, I believe, unfairly translated as "folk craft". In fact "Minshuteki" means "Democratic", and I would translate "Kogei" as "Art", though it is labelled "Craft" by many, and the definition of "Art" is so blurry as to be almost meaningless; the "Craft vs Art" argument doubly so. Art embraces such a plethora of meanings that everything from War to Palmistry is considered "The Art Of....". There is a huge difference in the implications of "Democratic Art" as opposed to "Folk Craft", wouldn't you agree?
What then is "Art", and what is "Democracy"? My goodness gracious I have opened a can of worms! "Kogei" in Japanese I feel would be best literally translated as the "Skill of Making things". "Art", the associated words "Bijutsu" and "Geijutsu" are a much bigger discussion, let us deal with that another day.
"Democracy", a concept with which the ancient Greeks blessed the world, has more recently been defined in political terms as " Government of the people, by the people for the people". The man who said "All great art is political" was a politician, not an artist. I don't believe that Yanagi sensei had government in mind when he coined the term, so let us put it together as "The skill of making things of the people, by the people for the people". Cumbersome, but nevertheless relevant. If at this stage you feel that you don't fit into any of the aforesaid categories (ie people, people or people) then you may stop reading any time you like.
Simply put, Yanagi felt that the objects created by a traditional lifestyle (and that includes the lifestyle itself), not appealing to a critical audience for aesthetic plaudits, were made of necessity in the same way that nature dictates the forms of "things" as an expedient to their existential efficiency. No pretense or "Artifice", merely the most effective use of available natural materials to achieve a healthy and humanistic lifestyle. Nature makes things in the most efficient way possible, bound by the laws of physics, and they are always beautiful. In a traditional society humans live lives that are bound to the rhythm of nature. They do not distance themselves from those constraints but embrace them as common condition of existence. Consequentially they find solutions to problems of survival by utilizing those same laws in as efficient a method as possible with the materials at hand which are, as a matter of course, beautiful. They do not set out to make something beautiful in the Ars Gratia Artis sense, but as a result of shedding unnecessary adornment achieve a beauty of uncluttered and healthy efficiency. That is Mingei in its essential form.

The Mingei movement, as opposed to pure mingei, acknowledged that the "traditional" lifestyle and culture of the world was doomed to extinction by the global industrialization of society. The grand homogenization had begun and an urban society which ignored natural process and deified uselessness was robbing people of their humanity. The cumulative error of fashion and ephemeral, superficial gratification was creating an artificial culture where sameness was the rule and humans (who are by nature like nature and infinitely variable) were losing their sense of self and self purpose.
The objective of the Mingei movement was to consciously incorporate the aesthetics of traditional MINGEI into products which were relevant to modern lifestyle, thus rehumanising a rapidly desensitised society.

Cool.

The problem is that, a generation later, so called Mingei artists are now making "mingei-like" virtually useless objet d'art which is irrelevant to the needs of modern society. They are either mistaking regurgitation for tradition and producing things people neither need nor want, or are equating technique with tradition and producing work which looks fine but is unpleasant to use.
I asked Shimaoka sensei one day, when I was wedging clay for him in his studio, " What is the future of mingei?"
He said, "Euan, you always ask difficult things," and laughed.
"Mingei as such is finished. Traditional society is unable to compete with the luxury of materialism. It is the task of the mingei artist, however, to make work which reminds people of their individuality and their place in the natural world. To make work in line with the principles of mingei and a natural, traditional society, which people can use every day and be reminded of their own humanity and the beauty of life." Of course that's a translation of what I seem to remember he said in Japanese, so it's probably just my interpretation.
For me, the challenge has been to discover that which does not change, the things which all people in all cultures identify with because we are all human. I have discovered that it is as simple as asking myself, "What do I love?"
Regardless of culture, race, religion, language or education; every single person on earth can look at a sunset every day and be moved by its beauty. Though we individually may have preferences, we all love delicious, fragrant and wholesome food. There are intrinsic commonalities that bind us one to another, and we have more in common than we have that differ. Though the differences are obtrusive, they are superficial.
I am not a people, I am a person. All of humanity is made of individuals like me, like you. I will continue to use all of my skill to make things that I personally find beautiful and useful, of a personal nature, by this person, for the person I love. That's Mingei.