Aoki Hiroshi
ENG
Seeds of the Earth, 2024
Clay, hand-building, 1240℃, 95 x 23 x 46cm.
Aoki Hiroshi says that each time he makes a work, he feels as though he is holding a conversation with clay and fire. Yet at the end of that conversation, what remains is ultimately himself. The work takes shape as the conversations and time exchanged with clay, fire, and the artist himself accumulate layer by layer.
He is drawn to objects that have naturally changed over long stretches of time. But he has no interest in deliberately making something look old. What matters more is that the time actually spent making the work remains intact within its surface and process.
To achieve this, he presses several kinds of clay by hand onto an already-completed object, applies glaze over it, and fires it again. He then gradually scrapes away the once-fired glaze. Beneath the glaze, the areas that were not directly exposed to heat and the areas that reacted with the glaze and fired hard leave behind different traces. As he slowly strips away the surface glaze, the complex layers and textures hidden beneath it gradually come into view.
