Japan’s Female Ceramists are Being Celebrated on the International Stage

For a long time, women in Japan were allowed little involvement in the production of ceramics. Not permitted to create pieces or use the kilns, they were restricted to finishing, painting and decorating items. But then World War II changed everything and, from the 1950s, women began to enrol on apprenticeship programmes and open their own studios, collectively breathing new life into ceramics.

Until January, the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, the only museum in Canada to be dedicated to ceramics, will be celebrating the ‘independence, creativity and technical genius’ of these female artists in an exhibition entitled Japan Now: Female Masters. The pieces on display, selected by New York-based collector Joan B. Mirviss, exemplify this new style of Japanese ceramics, liberated from codes and rules.

Toshiko Takaezu, who passed away in 2011, is often cited as the pioneer of this movement. Throughout her career, she played a significant role in elevating ceramics from a craft to an art by forcing functionality to take a back seat: her works, in the shape of pebbles or cylinders, are sometimes minuscule and often oversized, but virtually always impossible to use in everyday life.

Many other female artists have followed in her footsteps over the decades. The hugely creative nature of their pieces is equal to their lack of practicality, keeping Takaezu’s spirit alive. This is especially true of Sakurai Yasuko’s ‘Flower’ vases (pierced with apertures, meaning they could never be filled with water) or those by Kishi Eiko which can only hold one or two flowers at once.

Among Toshiko Takaezu’s successors, Fujikasa Satoko, born in 1980, particularly stands out. Her fascinating work, in neutral tones, celebrates the fluidity of ceramics. The shapes and colours she uses recall the fabric Jeanne Lanvin would drape over mannequins in the early days of the fashion house.

These masterful pieces, which seem to be constantly in movement, pay homage to the words spoken by Toshiko Takaezu in 1975: ‘You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in their own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.’