Light in Shoes
Information
- Period
- 7/31/2015-9/30/2015
About the Exhibition
We are pleased to present the works of Kaoru Ojio, a ceramic artist who explores diverse textures of light through ceramic works illuminated from within.
Born in 1969 in the city of Gifu, Kaoru Ojio completed her degree in art at Kyoto City University of Arts in 1996. She began working with ceramics as an undergraduate, producing works through the medium of porcelain, which is hard and yet transmits light, using shoes, bags, hats, and other motifs from daily life. Her work won attention while she was still in university and has been shown in a number of exhibits both in Japan and overseas.
The exhibit displays some of her leading works, mainly those of the “light in shoes” pieces that illustrate her new efforts in a series she calls “Crystals of Vestiges.” We hope you will enjoy the forms she creates in clay to record her day-to-day work, not-to-be-forgotten moments, and times of comfort and happiness.
Artist’s comment
Something like the crystals of all sorts of things—like events that happened in the past or even things that could happen in the future—might be present within me in the present. What I am trying to express is what my present self can tell about such things.
It seems to me that clay—earth—that material that can be found anywhere, is the purest and most familiar of the materials of artistic expression. It is the material from which the Jōmon pottery was made and the wall murals in caves. So I, too, chose to work with the familiar and simple material of clay, using motifs from the things around me in daily life.
Among clays, porcelain has two polar qualities: its whiteness and fineness lends it to delicate and sensitive expression as well as gentle, flowing lines while at the same time, it can be cut before firing to express clean, distinct lines, and finally fires to a hard texture. I prize the presence of these opposite qualities in my works.
There are things that come to me in the course of my daily work, so what I try to do is to record them, as if in a diary, in my work. So my works are a kind of record of the traces of thoughts I want to remember, times when I feel good, and the spirit of creation. —Kaoru Ojio