Statement

I use ceramics as a record-making flipbook as a Japanese Canadian American hailing from middle America with an infinite curiosity making sense of an overwhelming world.

I view these pieces as pattern making couture fashion; layered with symbols, images, prose, mantras, quotes, poems, cartoons, etc. rendered in decorative slip and glazes referencing both Japanese studio ceramics and the greater East Asian diaspora’s ceramic traditions.

Influenced by high and low commodities, images, prose, poems, quotes, are strewn on hand built works transforming the clay into sculptural canvases. Shaking the baggage of ceramic tradition of art as ornamental object works are imbued with a sense of instantly built architectures serving as a means of communication.

These are sculptured canvases, always signed in a monogram or hankō of the surname of my mother and late grandmother with utmost pride.

The results- equal and opposite reactions to the growing presence of “high” technology in everyday life compounded by 2100 degrees of heat and pressure to produce fine glass relics to hold fast and persevere through that same overwhelming world.