Balancing Design with Usability: Blue-and-White Pottery by Watanabe Ai

January 26, 2016Ceramics Watanabe Ai

People often ask us how Studio KotoKoto decide on which potters to work with, and the first thing that springs to mind is that we work with makers who create vessels that inspire use. It also doesn’t hurt if they share the same attractive names as us.

So when I saw Watanabe Ai’s blue-and-white pottery, I immediately imagined all kinds of appetizers and snacks served on her lovely plates on top of my dining table. Simple everyday objects like onions, gourds, and flowers inspire Watanabe-san, who was educated as a designer at University of Tsukuba’s School of Art and Design.

Blue-and-White cups by Japanese potter Watanabe Ai. She gets inspiration from simple everyday objects.

She is quick to emphasize, though, that the most important element in making is to balance design with usability. “Pursuing the look makes pots too expensive or uncomfortable for use”, she believes, and “an effusive work is remarkably difficult to be accommodated into people’s lives.” Her creations are true to this philosophy, and bold as the patterns may seem, they enhance and do not get in the way of the food they carry.

Balancing design with usability is of utmost importance to Watanabe Ai. The bold design does not get in the way of food but becomes an enhancing background.

“The brilliance of colors that I saw when I traveled in Asia, Turkey and England as a student really stuck with me, and I feel that it is coming out in my work,” Watanabe-san says. Certainly, the use of a single vivid shade of blue gives her work a distinct modern look, since the vast majority of Japanese blue-and-white pottery makers employ different shades of blue that gives them a more traditional look.

Watanabe Ai painting onions on a cup. The use of a single vivid shade of blue gives her work a distinct modern look.

After graduating from university, Watanabe-san initially worked for a toy trading company where she honed her skills in design through creating catalogs and 2D advertising. “I worked to sell things but I aspired to create things with my own hands,” she reflected.

While visiting craft shows, she was motivated to become a potter because pottery-making seemed to allow for so much freedom in colors and shapes. So she left her stable job and went to study pottery at Seto Pottery Senior High School in Aichi prefecture.

Watanabe Ai of Kikakikaku showing her work at a 2015 craft show in Japan. She was inspired to become a potter while visiting craft shows.

When I met Watanabe-san in the spring of 2015, it had only been a year since she established a pottery business called Kikakikaku with her husband Murayama Takumi, who provides sales and production support. I remember being amazed that she was showing her work at a juried craft show alongside experienced and well-known makers.

Just last month, Kikakikaku moved into an old house that used to be a hair salon and is currently in the process of being converted into a studio. Their plan is to have a mini-gallery adjacent to the studio, just like many potters do in Japan. “That’s our dream, and for us to make a living by making pottery”, Watanabe-san says.

The new pottery studio and kiln of Kikakikaku in Odawara city in Kanagawa prefecture. In the photo, Murayama-san is converting what used to be an old hair salon into the pottery studio.

She is eager to gain more experience and develop more techniques to create wares as close to what she has visualized while she is making them. “Pots warp and shrink, and the colors of the stain and texture of the glaze turn out differently depending on the temperature and density of the kiln”, Watanabe-san explains.

Photos of pots before and after firing in a kiln. Watanabe-san is eager to build up her experiences and techniques so that her completed pots have the desired colors and consistency of glaze.

Watanabe-san’s enthusiasm and sensibility for design are purely reflected in the work that she makes. She chuckles that recently she has been drawing lots and lots of onions, but “I have so many motifs swirling in my head that I want to put onto my vessels.”

We are excited to introduce these creative works of Watanabe Ai to the U.S. and cannot wait to see innovative new works coming out of this young and talented potter’s kiln in the future.

Introducing Kikuchi Yuka: Porcelain Potter Who Stands Out From the Crowd

September 3, 2013Ceramics Kikuchi Yuka

Ceramics by Kikuchi Yuka in our shop ->

In my travels around Japan, I sometimes come across richly talented artists who are little known but whose work stand out from the crowd. One such gifted potter is Kikuchi Yuka, who makes beautiful and functional works with black inlay (zougan) and blue-and-white (sometsuke) porcelain.

Amakusa porcelain dessert plate with black inlay by Kikuchi Yuka

Yuka shines because of her exceptional ability to produce forms that marry contemporary elegance with simplicity and tradition, and in portraying nature through stylized patterns in her blue-and-white porcelain.

What adds to Yuka’s talent was the experience that she gained from learning from one of Japan’s great Kyoto sometsuke masters, Kondo Hiroshi. Kondo was an internationally famous potter and an avid teacher who took her along on his workshops overseas. Yuka spent seven years studying under Kondo and she was his last apprentice before his death in 2012. While Yuka learnt a great deal, it was also a humbling experience and she initially found it difficult to escape her master’s shadow. “For a long time I was bound by my self-inflicted pressure not to disappoint my teacher”, she said.

But with Kondo’s passing, Yuka has finally begun to find her own way, which is allowing her to produce work with style and vigor. “I now think that I should simply make the best pots that I can make”, she said.

Potter Kikuchi Yuka throwing on the wheel at her studio in Minamiaso

Yuka’s zougan works are simple but uniquely elegant vessels. “I design my work to compliment the food, so its presence is felt but does not overwhelm“, she explains. Her sometsuke work, which she only started making recently, is a display of exceptional skill in brush techniques and stylized expressions through shades of blue. It is a fitting homage to her late teacher.

Blue-and-white porcelain mamezara depicting Higo camellia by Kikuchi Yuka

Yuka makes her wares by throwing clay on the wheel, which is trimmed down to the shape she requires. She alters the clay’s hardness depending on the size of the piece that she throws. The size and shape of each pot is determined carefully for its usability. But she says it is difficult to control the shape because when the piece dries, the clay often warps to the way that it was thrown, almost like it has a memory.

Higo camellia is the pride and symbol of Kumamoto, a prefecture often overlooked in Japan.

One reason why Yuka is little known is that her studio and house, Ennyo-gama, is located in the distant village of Minamiaso about 25 miles east of Kumamoto in Kyushu Island. It is on the volcanic caldera of Mt. Aso and is famous for its healing hotsprings. I had the opportunity to meet Yuka at her studio this past spring when I traveled to Kumamoto with a pottery tour group organized by Bill Geisinger and Ben Horiuchi.

Kikuchi Yuka’s studio and kiln Ennyo-gama

All of Yuka’s work is made using porcelain that comes from the Amakusa Islands, which are just off the coast from Kumamoto. Amakusa porcelain is famous for its pure white color, durability, plasticity and minimal shrinkage and slumping when fired. While Amakusa supplies as much as 80 percent of the Kaolin used for porcelain clay production in Japan, porcelain pottery made in Kumamoto is not well known.

Kikuchi Yuka’s showroom in Minamiaso, Kumamoto. All of her work is made using local porcelain from Amakusa.

Yuka said that when she announced in 2008 that she was ending her apprenticeship in Kyoto and moving home to open a studio in Kumamoto, “almost everyone around me asked if there was any pottery there”. Yuka pointed out that while “Kumamoto is best known as the raw material provider and agricultural center of Japan, there is a lot more happening here.” She hopes that her work will help people recognize Kumamoto for its culture, history and tradition, an accolade that it very much deserves. We at Studio Kotokoto will certainly be paying attention to Yuka and Kumamoto as we enjoy the creative elegance and flair that she brings to porcelain pottery.