Catching the spirit
of the clay

How long have I been working with clay, and how many times have I fired my kiln? Many years, and I’m still fascinated by clay and fire, even with my electric kiln!

When I look at clay, when I touch it, when sometimes I taste it, I try to feel, to sense the secret message of this marvellous material, to understand the power of clay! How can I translate it in my work? And most difficult of all, how can I ensure that this power lives on after my firing? Clay is not just any material, it is something living.

I was born and I got my ceramic education in Japan. This background evidently influences my work. The beautiful transitions of the four seasons, the fruits they bring to the archipelago and sometimes the fear of natural disasters. Life is greatly related to nature in Japan, and we learn to respect it.

Now, for over thirty years, I’ve been living in Paris. Here, when I find even a small leaf on the street of this big city, nature continues to give me inspiration for my work.

And I never forget to pray when I close the door of my kiln…

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Yoshimi Futamara was born in Nagoya in 1959.

She studied ceramics at the School of Ceramic Art in Japan in Seto from 1979 to 1981. She graduated from the Center artisanal de Ceramique at the Duperré school in Paris in 1994. Two years later, she opened her workshop in Paris where she has lived and worked since 1986.

« I was born and I got my ceramic education in Japan. This background evidently influences my work. The beautiful transitions of the four seasons, the fruits they bring to the archipelago and sometimes the fear of natural disasters. Life is greatly related to nature in Japan, and we learn to respect it. Now for over thirty years, I’ve been living in Paris. Here, when I find even a small leaf on the street of this big city, nature continues to give me inspiration for my work

And I never forget to pray when I close the door of my kiln…»

Yoshimi Futamura

(..) Translate the telluric life, of the depths of the earth, this earth that she treats with great finesse to express, in hollow, a violence. Violence of the clay’s bursting under the heat, which translates the cracked slip of the white porcelain milk revealing, in a striking contrast, the black of the underlying clay. Violence of the deformations and collapses undergone, under the effect of the heat, by the initial regular forms. Finally, violence of the formal result, close to calcinations or organic degradations, kinds of mushrooms, barks, noble putrefactions. It’s confer to these works a strong dramatic charge.

From this aesthetic of transformation emerges a great truth, a form of questioning of time and its effect on matter. Frozen in a phase of its disappearance, magnifying the emptiness, the absence, the hollow, at the heart of the living in mutation.

Valérie Bach