Hijiri Tougane

The vessels I, Hijiri Tougane, make are created with the Gaba-ikomi forming technique: liquid clay is poured into highly absorbent plaster molds, which draw out its water so that it sets into shape. The small objets, the crystal bases and the picture frames you see in my work are all formed together from one and the same clay. It is the only technique that can give birth to forms like these.

Vessels made with this technique, which once supported the Mino-ware ceramics industry, astonished and captivated ceramics industries around the world as “costly vessels like jewels.” The times then shifted toward mass production and mass consumption, and production centered on low-priced goods for the largest group of consumers, so “handmade products,” which take money and time, gave way to “machine-made products.” The ceramics industry gained momentum. Yet whenever something is gained, something is lost.

What the industry lost was “technique,” passed from human hand to human hand. In recent times, as people spend more time at home, more and more people around the world have been seeking vessels to decorate their interiors. Costly handmade vessels by ceramic artists have come to be sought all over the world. The output of ceramic artists, myself included, is tiny compared with that of the ceramics industry. Even when there is demand, supply cannot keep up. In 2021, I searched throughout Mino ware to find a manufacturer I could ask to produce my vessel works. What I learned there was the reality that “the handwork of the past can no longer be done.” The cause was that, as demand for handmade goods declined over many years, craftspeople became unnecessary, and the technique itself became unnecessary. This is how I came to feel that my mission in making vessels is “to create demand” and “to encourage successors.”

In April 2023, hoping that words like “Making vessels is cool!” “Amazing!” “I want to try it!” and “I want to take on handmade work in the ceramics industry once again” would be born between the industry and the generation that will carry the next era, that new successors would grow in number, and that a fresh wind would rise through the industry, in May 2023 I set up the “Showcase Atelier” (魅せるアトリエ), an atelier with a shop window, in the land of Mino ware that has supported me as an artist, on the street front of the Oribe Street tourist area, at THE GROUND MINO, a complex that kindly supported the idea.