Category: aato

Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists is the first book to present conversations with some of the most important living Japanese ceramic artists. Tracing the evolution of modern and contemporary craft and art in Japan, this groundbreaking volume highlights sixteen individuals whose unparalleled skill and creative brilliance have lent them an influence that far transcends national borders.

Despite forging illustrious careers and earning international recognition for their work, these sixteen artists have been little known in terms of their personal stories. Ranging in age from sixty-three to ninety-three, they embody the diverse experiences of several generations who have been active and successful from the late 1940s to the present day, a period of massive change. Now, sharing their stories for the first time in Listening to Clay, they not only describe their distinctive processes, inspirations, and relationships with clay, but together trace a seismic cultural shift through a field in which centuries-old but exclusionary potting traditions opened to new practitioners and kinds of practices.

Listening to Clay includes conversations with artists born into pottery-making families, as well as with some of the first women admitted to the ceramics department of Tokyo University of the Arts, telling a larger story about ingenuity and trailblazing that has shaped contemporary art in Japan and around the world. Each artist is represented by an entry including a brief introduction, a portrait, selected examples of their work, and an intimate interview conducted by the authors over several in-person visits from 2004 to 2019. At the core of each story is the artist’s personal relationship to clay, often described as a collaboration with the material rather than an imposing of intention.

This publication accompanies the exhibition Artifices instables, Histoires de céramiques, presented at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Sauber and curated by Cristiano Raimondi.Featuring more than two hundred pieces, the project escapes the well-trodden art historical narratives that keep ceramics at the margins of the arts, and instead pays tribute to the medium and investigates it as a heterogeneous material capable of narrating multiple histories.

Taking as its starting point the creation of the first Ceramic Art Workshop of Monaco in the second half of the nineteenth century, the book portrays some of the leading figures in the Principality’s ceramic history—the Fischers, Albert Diato, and Eugène Baudin—and creates bridges and resonances with numerous artists, among them Johan Creten, Simone Fattal, George Ohr, Ron Nagle, Pablo Picasso, and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, some of whom may be distant in space and time, but nevertheless share deep connections and unexpected complicities.The book gathers more than a century of visions that this malleable medium has inspired, and mirrors ceramic artists in its aspiration to provoke a shift in perspective.

Edited by Cristiano RaimondiTexts by Cecilia Canziani, Valérie Da Costa, Chus Martínez, Cristiano Raimondi, and Agnès Roux.

Edith Heath: Philosophies is the most comprehensive resource on Edith Kiertzner Heath (1911-2005) and the history of Heath Ceramics to date, emphasizing the philosophical foundations and influences of one of the most significant creative forces in post-WWII America. Heavily illustrated, it features a foreword, preface, visual historical timeline, product and dinnerware glaze history, and thirteen chapters contributed by artists and scholars who have conducted research using the Brian and Edith Heath/Heath Ceramics Collection at the Environmental Design Archives (EDA), UC Berkeley. This publication will serve as a complement to the 2021 exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, offering substantial and in-depth commentary on the presented themes—the environment, feminism, experimentation, architecture, politics, collaborations—while solidifying the relevance of Edith Heath’s story in contemporary life and society.

Thematically organized, Edith Heath: Philosophies emphasizes lesser-known narratives and utilizes rarely seen images. Edith Heath considered her dinnerware to be more than a collection of objects; it was a statement of good design reflecting the post-war American West Coast lifestyle. The book departs from the traditional linear narrative of the company and situates Edith Heath as an influential and under-acknowledged figure in ceramic design history. The text and rich illustrations will appeal to a diverse audience interested in post-WWII design, material culture, and California history.

This book captures the raw moment of inception behind a designer’s collection. Assemblage 6 started off with almost 300 maquettes: chairs, lamps, stools, or daybeds made of wire, cardboard, tape, and canvas, or the everyday materials to be found in Faye Toogood’s studio. But having lined up these rather crude, almost childlike maquettes, the collection, in essence, was decided. Seventeen were chosen to be scaled up to life-size works, and here we have an immersive journey through all the original maquettes and their occasional passage into the real world of furniture/sculpture, a book that plays with the sense of dissimulation evident in the final artworks, or the fact that some objects are not always what they seem at first glance.

The Man Booker–nominated author Sophie Mackintosh opens with this idea in her short story, while the book closes on an essay by the independent writer and curator Glenn Adamson, who ultimately provides context for the collection and process as a whole.

Guido De Zan was born in Milan in 1947, and in 1975 he began his research in the field of ceramics. He used stoneware and porcelain to create both sculptures and functional objects. This monograph is dedicated to his 40-year career as a ceramist, during which he sought ways to “lighten” the material and seek balance, however unstable it seemed. Comprising a rich catalogue of works divided into categories, it presents new texts by several authors, including De Zan himself. It also features a critical anthology of writings that emphasise the fundamental themes of De Zan’s research, from the relationship between art and manual labour, to his connection with Milan.

The art of ceramic restoration with lacquer and gold powder.

Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese art of restoring a ceramic object by gluing the broken ends with lacquer and then making up the scars with gold powder.

Izumi Shimura, the author, practices and teaches the art of kintsugi.

Photographs © Studio Haberfeld

This long-awaited monograph presents the breadth of JB Blunk’s practice and includes never-before-seen archival and newly commissioned photographs of jewelry, ceramics, paintings, furniture, sculpture and his hand built house. Edited by Mariah Nielson and Åbäke, the book features essays by Lucy Lippard, Glenn Adamson, Fariba Bogzaran and Louise Allison Cort.

‘Solid Ground’ by Nathalie Lautenbacher of Aalto University comprises a selection of photographs and thoughtful essays in its close examination of ceramics and their appeal. While the field of design currently covers a variety of different materials and technologies, and even operates within immaterial domains, the ancient art of ceramics remains highly relevant. The book’s seven chapters reflect not only today’s trends but also lasting phenomena within the field of ceramics. Many of these themes are archaic, having evolved naturally over time. Writers from a variety of fields search for bridges between culture, art, and academia, to discover the roots of this versatile material.

“White” is not a book about colors. It is rather Kenya Haras attempt to explore the essence of “White,” which he sees as being closely related to the origin of Japanese aesthetics – symbolizing simplicity and subtlety. The central concepts discussed by Kenya Hara in this publication are emptiness and the absolute void. Kenya Hara also sees his work as a designer as a form of communication. Good communication has the distinction of being able to listen to each other, rather than to press one’s opinion onto the opponent. Kenya Hara compares this form of communication with an “empty container”. In visual communication, there are equally signals whose signification is limited, as well as signals or symbols such as the cross or the red circle on the Japanese flag, which – like an “empty container” – permit every signification and do not limit imagination. Not alone the fact that the Japanese character for white forms a radical of the character for emptiness has prompted him the closely associate the color white with emptiness.

The Keramikos book presents front-and-back photographic records of 300
painted pieces that artists Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Natsuko Uchino
produced since 2010 – including plates, bowls, pitchers and oil jars.
Some objects are accompanied by narrative descriptions that present
aspects of the duo’s vast and complex research exploring notions of
society, religion, politics, style and technique through the long
history of ceramic production motifs from Hispano-Moresque, Byzantine,
Islamic and Korean ceramics. Each plate is printed on the recto side
with its reverse shown in the same position on the verso side of the
same page. An extensive index completes the book as well as an interview
with the artist and curator Nicolas Trembley.

This volume presents Aldridge’s recent and older works, and features an interview and three original essays about her practice.

“For me it is about the conversation between materials and approaches, allowing the work to discuss and emphasise strategies of making and reception through different choices. The push and pull between dualities such as synthetic versus natural, object versus subject, inside versus outside runs throughout my practice and prevents the meaning of an artwork [from] becoming prescriptive. This way of working allows for a kind of language of comparison. It affords me space to articulate my interests in a way that doesn’t pin down the work or explain it away; rather, it provides me with a framework to take risks with the practice. It’s not so easy to be able to say what something is doing while you are doing it, but as long as I am inside that tension you’re speaking of, I know I am onto something.” —Laura Aldridge

The Journey of Things by Magdalene Odundo has been published alongside the exhibition of the same name presented at The Hepworth Wakefield in Spring 2019. The book features 44 of Odundo’s vessels alongside a large selection of museological and contemporary objects that reveal the wide range of global references that have informed her practice. The book object comprises a series of interleaved sections presenting an organic flow of content which pairs and juxtaposes the historic and the contemporary, featuring works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Lucie Rie, Jean Arp, as well as ancient vessels from Greece and Egypt, historic ceramics from Africa, Asia and Central America, and ritual objects from across the African continent.

Makoto Kagoshima, based in the southern island of Japan, illustrates whimsical and heart-warming motifs on clay making each ceramic a unique, one-of-a-kind work of art. As an avid gardener, motifs such as pansies and roses appear throughout his designs with occasional appearances of butterflies and other fantastical creatures.

After moving to Yatsugatake, the time Kimura spent creating furniture from used construction wood was merely 11 years—from the start of Trax to his passing—yet he produced a multitude of aspiring furniture and objects in that short period of time. On the other hand, his architectural involvement, including Starnet in Mashiko, are rather unrecognized despite the remaining unique buildings. This publication is a summary of the immense amount of photographs and documentation of his furniture, objects, and space-making centered around Trax that Kimura had left behind. Most of the included pictures were taken at Trax, as a space in itself. In addition to text written by Kyohei Sakaguchi, Elein Fleiss, and Tohru Matsushita (SIDE CORE), all of whom are associated with Trax, the book also includes sketches and drawings by Kimura, as well as photographs of the garden and Jomon culture that served as inspiration. Even twenty years after his death, many of Kimura’s works remain timeless, preserved mainly in Trax. This book is a study of Jiro Kimura’s creative journey with Trax, as a gallery and a piece of art.

Gallery Trax started in 1993, at the foot of Yatsugatake in Hokuto City, Yamanashi. Founded by interior designer Jiro Kimura and designer Etsuko Miyoshi, this building used to be a nursery of a closed town school on the grounds of Shounji Temple. It was renovated by Kimura himself, and furniture and objects he created composed the space. Trax is distinctive not only for its location or atmosphere, but also for being an exhibition space for artists such as Jun Tsunoda, Tomoo Gokita, Katsumi Omori, Rinko Kawauchi, Yayoi Deki, and others since their early career. With the wind blowing through and light shining in, the gallery is not a so-called White Cube. The room and the works seem to breathe here; the space itself is a work of art which has embraced numerous art pieces over the years. Since Kimura passed away in 2004, Miyoshi has maintained the place as a gallery, and the number of visitors to Trax, a place where the spirit of Kimura still resides, sees no end.