The Seventh Heterotopias

2024 | local raw materials, minerals, clay, pigments, found objects | size various

The series of artworks started with my fear that I would get dementia in the future, so as my mother and her mother. I wished to preserve my precious memories before they faded away from me.

Both stones and ceramic materials as geological components contain a history of hundreds of millions of years. One piece of rock in the local park in Tokyo might have witnessed my childhood days with my father who has already passed away. That idea transformed the stone into evidence of my memory representing the place. I pick up the stone, wrap it with ceramics and raw materials while layers of colours and textures implying the story or the scenes to preserve. The firing process integrates the place and my qualia to become a container of my memory. The heat of 1280 Celsius reveals the hidden layers of minerals because of the clay shrinkage and suggests no memories remain perfect, yet it gains its own beauty.

 In this series, I use two fundamental characteristics of ceramics, the historical function of the container and its permanence as fired mineral components, to materialise invisible memories eternally through encapsulating them within ceramics.