Object

Pottery made to be put somewhere rather than used. With no food to hold, the form and the clay itself are all there is. You pick one up to feel the weight, turn it over to look at the foot — the same way you would judge a bowl.

Small lidded jars, and shapes built up from the clay by hand. The pieces fired without glaze keep whatever the flame and the ash did to them inside the kiln, left on the surface as a kind of landscape. No two come out of one firing alike, because the fire reaches each spot in the kiln differently. All of them sit in the palm, so a shelf corner or the end of a desk is enough room.

Japan has a long habit of keeping ceramic figures around the house for luck. Where that comes from is in the Shigaraki tanuki, and the way a fired surface is read as scenery in reading the landscape of a piece.