Taking advantage of properties found when working with porcelain clay and glass, such as distortion, crazing, chipping, and glaze pooling, Ogawa Machiko creates utsuwa (vessels) like Water Disc that have an ambiguity about them, possessing aspects of both creation and destruction. Ogawa says that she developed this way of thinking about art and design when her eyes were opened to the beauty of minerals during visits to the Musée de Minéralogie Mines during her stay in Paris, and she came to realize that “form already exists” within minerals.
Her “Crystals and Memories” series is another masterpiece that allows you to see the same kind of thinking. Her artworks, in which clumps of porcelain clay and glass become one, exuding a peaceful light, look very much like crystals that have been excavated from the earth, and encapsulate memories spanning vast stretches of time.
Quartz and feldspar, the raw material for ceramic and porcelain clay, come from granite—magma that has cooled and hardened deep below the surface of the earth—that has gone through a process of weathering and sedimentation over the course of tens of millions of years. Consequently, making pottery involves working with material that has traversed a mind-numbing expanse of time, and making it undergo an irreversible transformation by heating it. And, once turned into pottery, it will not break down or weather easily, retaining its shape for tens of thousands of years.
Pottery is created at the intersection of the human time line and the time line at which material is transformed on a geological scale that is beyond what can be grasped by human perception. The inherent characteristics and origins of pottery making today have become obscured due to the entire process—everything from the acquisition of raw materials to manufacturing and sales—having become highly systematized. Ogawa’s art reveals the primal characteristics of pottery. How much time will elapse as these forms, found and crystalized once more by the artist, weave memories far into the future.