ARTIST IN RESIDENCE IN THE SHIGARAKI CERAMIC CULTURAL PARK JAPAN

As an artist I enjoy the challenge of putting intimacy and sensuality at the center of my practice in a time that art mainly became conceptual.

During a stay for three months as an artist in residence in the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in the Shiga Prefecture I very soon could sense the differences between East and West in the approach of the material.

I was surrounded by my mostly Japanese fellow artists who worked with clay as a material to give shape to their thoughts. I could not only see what kind of work they made, but most important and interesting for me was ‘how’ they made it.

Already the first day I could admire the way the Japanese artists wedged their clay as skilled artisans in a totally different way than Western artists. They used a kind of spiral wedging, called ‘KIKUNERI’ I learned.It drives out all the air of the clay before the start of a new work.

In Europe we use the ox head technique to get rid of the trapped air in clay, similar as kneading bread dough. ‘KIKUNERI’ or chrysanthemum kneading is wedging clay around a center. The movements of the hands generate a circular pattern of folds. The result of this way of kneading reminded me of a ‘navel’.

The wrinkled form of the kneading process in Japan I kept in memory and it inspired me some years later to start a project NAVEL, BODY , SKIN at the same place in the Shiga prefecture.

The result of the kneading process, the folded rotation in clay, essentially the starting point for a new ceramic work for the artist, was brought to a standstill.This amorphous object is given the name NAVEL-KNOT.

While drying the navel-knot unrolled and started to show cracks because of the enormous tension on the form.Tetsuya Ishiyama（石山 哲也） taught me how to work the cracks with Kintsugi. It highlighted the fracture and seemed a golden wound as part of the history of the form. As a perfectionist I learned to accept the scars and the traces of errors.