M.I.C.Fes Presentation

James KASPER (USA)

First, I want to thank all the people who have worked so hard to make M.I.C.Fes a great event.

Second, I want to express my appreciation to my fellow artists here for making this an educational and inspiring workshop. It is wonderful to see how all of these individual life experiences show up in the work we have seen on display here in Mashiko.

When HAMADA Shoji began work in Mashiko the world was on the verge of major industrial and social changes. Yet he saw past this to find richness in the heart of hand crafted articles and helped to renew their presence in the industrialized world.

In what one could consider the first international ceramics workshop, Hamada and Bernard LEACH began a running dialogue on aesthetics and technical issues while studying historic Japanese and English pottery.

Today we have passed the immediate concern that many traditional hand crafts will disappear in the near future. The technical issues of many hand crafts have reached a level of maturity and wide dissemination but the aesthetic considerations continue.

In the past 30 years woodfiring has moved from an archaic oddity in the technologically advanced counties to become one of the most exciting areas to be working in ceramics. Part of this is due to the connections developed between Japan and the West, started with Hamada and Leach, which reached new heights beginning about 1970.

The US has always borrowed materially from the many cultures that make up its population. In the 1960s the growing crafts movement also began to borrow spiritually from Asia. The Beatles went to India and Western potters headed to Japan. US potters began to woodfire in anagama kilns in styles strongly influenced by Japan. Japanese forms began to be produced with no real cultural support for them in the US. The confluence of the material and spiritual discoveries by US potters visiting Japan lead to little outposts of Japanese culture scattered throughout the US.

All of this was happening despite having an ongoing traditional woodfire ceramics community in the Southeastern US. Virtually no one was working in styles reflecting the Mid-Western and Eastern Native American forms and few outside of the Native American communities of the South-West were looking to the Anasazi and other old cultures.

Now that the Japan-West ceramics connection has reached maturity there is a growing interest in the ceramic heritage of other places around the world such as Korea, China, Africa, as well as islands in the industrialized world like Seagrove in the US and La Borne in France. Ceramists are in some ways at the front of this study of cultures as they try to understand the influence of Korea on Japanese ceramics, of China on both, of the work in Africa that has had a profound influence on painting in the 20th Century but less so on ceramics. This is self-serving for the artists as they look for inspiration and new (to them) expressions, but it is also essential to the health of woodfired ceramics globally.

Just as ceramics is in many ways the most sensual of the arts, from the visual to tactile to use, its spiritual connection is linked to the rituals and uses the forms were developed for. In this global age with more travel, television and the internet, the changes to social structures will require a response from the woodfire ceramic community if it is to maintain economic viability. I am not suggesting that some new global style must be adopted by potters, but that as the people of the world become more aware of each other ceramists must reflect that in their work. If they fail to do so they risk becoming hollow in their art much like the Egyptian tomb painters did after hundreds of years of ritual copying, or the Romans as they copied from the Greeks.

Workshops like M.I.C.Fes allow us to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of why the various pottery forms exist in their respective cultures, but more importantly they help us look at our own work in a new and deeper way. For many people, the best way to learn about their native language is to learn a second one. This makes more clear the syntax and grammar in the native tongue. It is the dull artist that fails to be excited by this personal challenge and growth. In the best case, that part of tradition which still reaches us spiritually today will grow and develop in our work and this cannot fail to lead to a healthier economic environment for woodfired ceramics around the world.

In my own case, I came from a family with no real traditions, no connections to my grandparents and with little social interaction outside of that at school. My life has primarily been connected with colleges and universities while studying physics. The forms of the tools I handled were directly related to a very specific scientific function. There was no place for the added expense of aesthetics.

But now that I am no longer involved in solid state physics research I begin to look back on those tools and my science studies with a sense of personal nostalgia. For a long time they simply worked their way into my ceramics. But I am now looking at them more directly and working to understand what is meaningful to me and to develop a personal vocabulary in the clay with which to express myself.

After years of making almost only sculpture, and in particular, head imagery (more than 20,000 pieces), I am now reconnecting with functional work. But 16 years of hand building has left me a little cold to the wheel so I am trying to make functional vessels in forms related to the lab ware I used for so long but in a more tactile and aesthetic manner through hand building. It has been at times a struggle to get past the tightness that is required in science to become accepting of the natural looseness and process that woodfired clay thrives upon. Having watched LEE Kang Hyo and JEON Moon Hwan (from Korea) and KOIE Ryoji (from Japan) I have become far more accepting of what the clay does on its own, from warping to cracking. And I learned to accept carving the clay from solid forms while watching ASADA Emiko (from Japan) and LEE Kang Hyo (from Korea) doing so. All of these people I had the good fortune to meet at workshops like M.I.C.Fes.

The images I am showing today are of things that inspire me and my response to them. They range from the land around my home to places and people I have visited to bits from the world of science that I studied.

The heads derived initially from the sculpture on Easter Island (Rapanui) and Romanesque sculpture.

The boats are an outgrowth of an interest in both the form and possible connotations. The form draws from the initial phase in forming some of the heads as well as from historical reference to work from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Vikings. Working with the historical referral of this form to the moon, the horns of bulls and boats, I build the bases to add modern counterpoint. The combination of the old and new, as well as personal experience, is hinted at in the title of each piece. I have in the past avoided titling work, but boats are traditionally named and in a manner that allows for great latitude in doing so.

The boxes relate to the abandoned farm houses that dot the countryside near where I live. I work with the boxes in varying states of decay/completeness as a natural capturing of the ambiguity of these homesteads – their abandonment can be seen as failure or success depending on the actual circumstances of the former residents.

The sarcophagi are inspired by highly carved Hellenistic versions. I have moved away from direct representational carvings on them but have tried to keep the three dimensional relief and energy/introspection associated with the loss of loved ones.

The reliquaries follow the path begun with the sarcophagi series in attempting to create large, massive forms to contain small precious items, much in the same way as the historical efforts in preserving bits of the Saints. But I have allowed the user to interact freely with the item by creating these with readily removable lids.

The wall tiles started as responses to medieval illuminated manuscript pages. They developed into topographic reliefs playing with integrated circuits and cityscapes viewed from above. Recently they have moved more toward a simple joy in what the clay does and can be helped to do. They still have some reference to landscape, the possibility of random markings looking like intentionally manmade marks and the visual vocabulary I have used for the past ten years.

The platters have become almost purely responses to images from space, from nebula to photos of the surfaces of planets and moons in the solar system.

A final note about my work, I stopped signing pieces in 2001 following the death of my father, Dr. Joseph Kasper, who worked with Dr. James Van Allen (discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts around the earth) and taught physics for many years at Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA.

I thank you, the audience and invited artists, for your attention to my presentation and hope I have helped make M.I.C.Fes useful and interesting in the spirit of HAMADA Shoji – honesty of spirit and technique.

 

Mashiko International Ceramics Festival 2006 web site

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