Every Bowl Tells a Story...

The earthquake in Tohoku yesterday was strong and long enough to get us jumping out of bed and ready for action, but eventually subsided without incident for us. The radio warned of a tsunami on the Tohoku coast, but we are high in the mountains of central Japan and far, far away...

...but memories of 2011, and the long road to recovery return.

When I was trying to re-establish my studio in Minakami after relocating from Mashiko, I wanted to take a step back from our modern reliance on infrastructure. I wanted to be free of fossil fuels and not dependant on electricity, to live a Mingei life, and was looking for a second hand kick wheel in Mashiko. The Hamada family gave me an old one of the workers wheels from the original Hamada Pottery, which is now the museum. I had the local garage de-rust the bearings, restored it to original condition myself and installed it in the new studio in our old farm house.

This tea bowl was made on that wheel, in the light from the window, with water drawn from our well.

Later, when the 8 chamber Noborigama at the Hamada Museum was restored, 30 Mashiko Potters were invited to fill the kiln so that it could be fired to set the repairs. Each of us had a share of the chambers, drawn by lot, and a small space in the fire mouth.

It was such a moving experience to have my pots spread out on Hamada Shoji's throwing deck, preparing the shells for the tea bowls filled with "Igusa" tatami rush.

And this was one of those bowls, rope marked in the Jomon style with silken "kumihimo" in homage to my master, Shimaoka Tatsuzo, fired in the first chamber of the Hamada noborigama for five days. You can see it still raw in the last photo, on this side of the middle board of bowls, second from the back.

There are not many of the pieces from this firing remaining now, some ten years on, but this is one of several which I will be sending to a two man show in Melbourne with my dear friend and colleague John Dermer at Skepsi Gallery next April.

There is so much to tell about this bowl, about all of the pieces from this series, that one post and a few photos barely scratch the surface...

 

Thusness

Long before humans existed, before we invented words like "beauty", long after we are gone, and every moment in between, the world, the universe, in macrocosm and microcosm, is beautiful as a matter of course. In the Bernard Leach adaptation of the writings of Yanagi Soetsu, The Unknown Craftsman, this is referred to as "thusness", the sublime and infinitely variable perfection of things as they are, as they should be, accepted and embraced without ego. We seem to forget that. To forget that we are a part of that, or to convince ourselves that we are other than that.

Instead we see ourselves as masters of the universe, imposing our will, our prejudices and preconceptions, upon nature. Our hubris. Our egos. And therein lies the source of another of our greatest inventions; Ugliness.

As a potter, working with natural materials and universal forces, I have come to understand that my greatest challenge is to not get in the way. My task is to understand the nature of those materials, their potential to interact with those forces, and to help them, guide them, facilitate their becoming. If I am successful in this endeavour, then a new expression of that "thusness" may come into being. One which also expresses my unique perspective as a fragment of nature gazing in wonder upon itself.