Akiko HIRAI

Akiko is a magician. She creates pots whose identity she anchors in another century so that they appear as witnesses of the passing of time as well as our nostalgia of a past, perhaps undefined, but when all pots were made to serve, to use their bellies to stock the food that would keep us alive. They are icons from another epoch bearing all the scars and stigmata of their imaginary odyssey. Their weathered and wounded condition, like their antiquity, is no more than a contemporary fiction. Their aim is to build a symbolic bridge between our inherited culture, deeply rooted in necessity, and our current uncaring way of life which appears, like drifting pack-ice,  facing an uncertain future.

These are pots with something to say that is both strong and clear and original so it’s not surprising that they have been critically acclaimed across the world. In fact her pots are seen as an intransigent affirmation of the potential of ceramic art to contribute to the contemporary debate without renouncing  either its values or indeed its traditional forms.

In technical terms, she has also demonstrated that with a bit of patient research, one can create ceramic surfaces that deliciously evoke the characteristics of famed historical productions with just a rudimentary gas kiln.