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August Issue 2007

Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro, NC, Features Works by Toshiko Takaezu

The Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro, NC, is presenting the exhibit, Toshiko Takaezu: The Art of Clay, featuring works by internationally acclaimed ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu. The exhibit will be on view through Aug. 25, 2007.

In the 1970's, Takaezu taught ceramic workshops over the course of several years at the invitation of UNC-Greensboro Art Department Head Bert Carpenter, and for two decades taught classes each summer at Penland School of Crafts.

Editor's Note: The following is a special article by an old friend of Carolina Arts on a major exhibition taking place in the Carolinas.

Encapsulating Spaces

by Pernille Ægidius Dake

Toshiko Takaezu is America's foremost potter.

Nothing can be put in nor taken out of Takaezu's pots. Some might insist they are not pots, but they are, in as much as they are containers. They do not, however, hold things like seasonal fruit or side dishes to Thanksgiving dinners. The content only alters as far as air, atmosphere, pulse in and out of one tiny opening in the vessels' spaces, varying in size from fist-covering to man-swallowing.

Turned by hands at once firm and gentle, the build-up or layering of coils is allowed to take its own turn, shaping up into slender cylinders or fat orbs that seem to continuously revolve and evolve; dance. Their sensuality is far from the rigid stone into which they have solidified through high firing. They are the epiphany of what art should be to any maker or observer - self-contained.

Inside, the fingers' gliding pressure-marks remain and somewhere among the light ripples Takaezu wrote words, unspoken and unknown. Maybe she left whole thoughts, ideas, conversations; perhaps only a single word, but maybe artwork-by-artwork, word-for-word, whole poems have been actually written, inside - and never read. We know she makes notes on the hidden inner, she tells us so, but they are, obviously not meant for us - the mystery is.

Outside, there rule just as much ambiguity, because Takaezu's master painting and layering of glazes are surely of what legends are made. Her title of Living Treasure (from the State of Hawaii) is undisputed also when we encounter her fabled glazing techniques. Few, even hardcore potters, come close to understanding her process, but what is grasped is mild mauve appearing like near-cooled surfaced lava; a mysterious red-violet quickly absolving into an inferno-red; then blaze, glaze over into bright purple and light sand-gray as if at the bottom of the ocean, yet clearly visible; at the base of the orb is charcoal black, wet-shiny as if wrung to drip-dry. These spins of succulent glazes play themselves out in Mauve Trio, 2000, (porcelain 9.5" x 6", 15" x 7.5", 9" x 5.5") and the variations of the play between the three vessels' nuances are endless as if a rainbow's end has been found and the glorious colors deposited; better than gold.

In Green Rain #2, 1990, (glazed stoneware, 25" x 12") white, green and black surfaces quickly meld into a softness of fine, pin-dot drizzles. The grains mix in a virtual meld-down, not meltdown, where it is impossible to tell if this structure is glooming-dark or blissful-light or light-green as changing from peppermint to weathered copper and then only occasionally succulent browns, as from the healthiest earth, peak through, reminding the viewer that underneath the marzipan soft luminosity is stoneware, harder than hard. On some pots drips shoot across like trails of fireworks, not straight, rather alive and on a mission like scouting ants. Coats of color run in switches of Takaezu's swift dips and turns and twists, often leaving imprints from her strong fingertips, essentially reminding us this is an earthly form. Or, we see and almost feel the heat of the kiln still working, as in Shiro Momo #2 (1990-1999, glazed stoneware, 25" x 13"). The surface looks perforated from burst bubbles - indentations from tiny ruptures in the kiln's inferno - formed in the whisking when mixing the glaze or from one layer quickly running over another or itself in successive dips to peak or bleed through as dots of air heated and broken free. The layered and thus intensified, thickened glazes accentuate the rupture of each little encapsulation of oxygen, leaving a crater in the fortified surface. We know it is on the outside the bubbles formed but it is as if the piece is trying to breathe from within, as if the narrow crack in the top is not enough space to release the inner power, which is what great works of art do; let you feel the unseen.

Great forces are evoked in every one of Takaezu's works. She constantly brings out new and further powers, because she despite her legendary biography remains humble before the task. She accepts inevitable chance as her co-worker in her experienced and carefully thought through creative process, a grand mastery not limited to works in clay. Takaezu weaves with the same diligence and magic, and though she can gauge the progressions on the loom the predictability is no more pronounced.

Takaezu's pots and rugs are alike though one is a flat, wooly surface made of dyed strands - colors soaked into spindly lint - and then hooked in short threads into tightly set, yet wavy rugs. The other is a hardened thin-walled ball of clay, dipped and slathered with dull liquids turning glossy - brilliant when fired in unimaginable temperatures. Both mediums speak of a process wherein the final product emerges as a might both seen and sensed.

Cascades, similar to the controlled, yet run-amok drips of Takaezu's finest glazes, flitters down the wall in the rug Haleakala, 1970 (linen, cotton, silk, wool, 98" x 45"). Bordered by bright purple streaks, muted colors still appear strong because of their arrangement: curry-ochre next to charcoal gray on one side and lavender, mauve and heather mix on the other, then mellow earth-brown that still plays glinting orange tricks because of incorporated thin silk threads. A narrow vertical row of black turns out not to be black at all, but dark green like an algae-filled ocean just before night arrests all light. That same dark streak borrows a glimmer of glow from the neighboring sea-kelp green luster that flows over into a row mixed of grey and quiet-blue of a high-noon sky, seeking toward a narrow green-brown before meeting the bordering purple - the bright frame. These narrow lines of vivid purple are perfect frames of reference to the soft gush of uneven yarn-lengths knotted together to an over eight feet tall wall-runner where the flow of colors are tied together by masterly association. Quiet counters boisterous, solemn balances cheerful.

Particularly the color purple - the symbol of wisdom - has the power of attention, offering a unique balance of giving and receiving, whether in Takaezu's weaving or ceramic work. Her strong use of violet/ultramarine glazes is daring beyond most artists' courage and the color-fields hold, carry and send off so many other shades, sensibilities. They are all hues at once their own and yet co-conspirators to a never-ending carrousel of coats of runny liquid turned fossil, eternal in its form and shape and glow, also in the flow of the viewer perceiving how they are tied together. We can at any given point be talking about either clay or yarn.

Ao-Ao, ca. 1960 (linen, cotton silk, wool, 88" x 139") is mostly dark, ultramarine blue, save for a flash of ochre across the bottom of the rug, but we feel the endless colors in that deep sky. The yarn is hooked, coming across like Van Gogh's swirls of contained windswept fields in intense color variables because of the yarn's combinations. The mix of threads, their erratic thickness, slightly different length, denseness, shininess, fussiness are truly unending differences in something so simple as these individual strands. They blend and echo multiple layers of glazes covering, peaking through, revealing and crash, but not clash, into a chemical reaction, like lovers meeting. Top-glazes shift over the surface like a rogue, fuzzy yarn running counter to the rest of any woven line.

In Seascape, c. 1960 (linen, cotton, silk, wool, 92" x 45 1/2") lengths of yarn end softly, threadbare as if stroked often, swirled in random whirls as on the fur of an old, contend dog someone gave a long, comforting rub-down. The rug almost glows from happiness as could come from that same canine laying down to rest, savoring the strokes of love with a deep, contented sigh - his ruffled fur the badge of love. Our eyes wander over the weaving like those lovingly stroking hands. We sense the caress of the generously-soft, long strands like grasses about to wave lazily in the wind, still standing so dense one can imagine pulling the lengths apart and finding darker and denser colors deeper down among the tight weave. This particular rug - one rarely seen; as with Haleakala - has a rippled, weave pattern that almost systematizes its near-geometric colors fields. Blends of yarns, concentrated in muted browns, grays, blues and purples roll down the wall in rows upon rows of changing colors. The ripples goad and urge the color fragments to mingle and swirl around just like in Takaezu's orbs. Whatever we see of her work we feel the overflow of artistic care in a melding, melting, into cascades of colors, imaginative - and unimaginable, until encountered in her art.

We want to lean against her wall-rugs; we want to hold, hug her orbs; never to let go. Her pots radiate the strength of her hands that wisely and carefully formed clay once rubbery-soft into mysterious forces that hold as much inside as outside. And if you could see through the coats of glazes dipped, covered and contemplated, then dipped again, hiding clay fired and hardened at temperatures in a goodly inferno so never to change again; if you could see though that scope then gold has surely been struck as if the key to eternal life has been found, because Takaezu's orbs seem to contain truth itself. Could we just open one up and see what she wrote, because looking on the outside we think we know what is on the inside. I have not seen, but heard that enclosed revealed, open; crack and shatter as it hit the ground and spread pieces of tiny and larger rainbow porcelain over my wooden floor. There was a party at my house and someone accidentally pushed over a shelf holding a Takaezu vessel. From another room I listened to the discharge and for an instant the sound stood large and powerful like a genie released from a bottle, as if the contained inner space blew itself up and became mightier than time itself. In a frozen second I heard the orb become bigger that life; the passing presence of the clear-bell-struck-sound alone enraptured all, all.

It is my conviction that most viewers of Toshiko Takaezu's art can hear that force, hear the dance of the pots, because with her work we run the whole gamut of emotions not out of confusion, but completion: legendary indeed, unprecedented inside or out. A treasure to behold.

This exhibition was organized by the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles in 2006, Green Hill is presenting an expanded version of the exhibition. Small and large scale clay works created throughout Takaezu's career will be on display as well as her lesser known weaving, on view through Aug. 25, 2007. This will be the exhibition's only east coast venue.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at 336/333-7460 or visit (www.greenhillcenter.org).

Pernille Ægidius Dake used to work and paint in Charleston, SC, but now lives and works in Upstate New York and is an arts advocate.

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