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KISHI EIKO
Back in the 1980s, Nara-born Kishi Eiko began to create colored chamottes in Shigaraki clay. She then inlaid these into hand-built ceramic forms of breathtakingly precise shape.
Once fired, she reveals the chamottes through a careful process of hand picking and engraving a web of fine lines into the surface. One piece of chamotte is roughly 2mm, and when glazed shines like silk thread Kishi calls this Saishiki-Zogan 「
As this complicated technique became the signature of her sculptural voice, Kishi began to be recognized and has received many awards throughout the years, including Grand Prize at the Asahi Ceramics Exhibition in 1985, Silver Medal at the 51st International Competition for Contemporary Ceramic Art in Faenza, Italy in 1999, and the Education Ministry Prize from the Kyoto Prefectural Center for Arts & Culture in 2013 And she didn't stop there She feels that all great art springs from deep thinking and considered ideology, and felt that her own work needed more depth. So she returned to university in her late 40s to study humanities, and after graduation began to show her ceramics internationally.
