“I stuck to one shape, more or less. My things are always round and tall, but there’s always a closed feeling. There’s air trapped in there. But there’s also – when they’re small – they all have sound, so that when you can touch it you can hear the sound. And sound is all over. You can hear the sound when you walk in the forest. This music. The sound is very important for me.”
Toshiko Takaezu,
Ceramic Artist, Dies at 88
Toshiko Takaezu, a Japanese-American ceramist whose closed pots and torpedolike cylinders, derived from natural forms, helped to elevate ceramics from the production of functional vessels to a fine art, died on March 9 in Honolulu. She was 88.
“You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used,” she told Ceramics Monthly in 1975. “An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.”
read more here via NYT....
Dear Toshiko,
You're better than your legend
and so are your pots better than pictures of them!"
- Joan Mondale (taken from Archives of American Art, here)
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