It is approaching twenty years since I first met Yoji Yamada. He would accompany Lisa Hammond to the various pottery fairs up and down the country in his role as her apprentice. I couldn’t claim to know him – I don’t imagine I am even on his radar now – but back then, we would exchange nods and smiles of recognition.
All these years later, I am flattered and honoured to have been tasked with compiling this essay about his work.
Very Large Rectangular Dish, slip trailing with natural ash glaze & carbonization, 12 x 53 cm
I write, not just from the perspective of someone who has enjoyed viewing the pots he makes, but as a maker myself, with a history of employing similar decorative techniques. This gives me an insight into the challenges of some of the process that Yamada practises so exquisitely on his pieces.
I refer particularly to the remarkable and accomplished slip trailed platters, which reference the baking dishes that were commonly made in Britain in the eighteenth century, predominantly in Staffordshire and North Wales.
Such pots were adorned with fluid trails and bold patterns of clay slip, applied to a contrasting background to great visual effect. They were not the fine porcelain pieces afforded by the upper classes, but rather the everyday pottery used by the less wealthy population.
While many makers in the United Kingdom draw influence from Japan, it gives me much pleasure to observe the impact of British pottery in the practice of Eastern potters. This can be traced back to the arrival of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, when they established the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall in 1920.
Leach, who had lived in Japan, acted as a cultural intermediary, helping to introduce Japanese ideas to Britain and vice versa. Until this time, the traditional, rustic country pottery of Britain was certainly not considered sophisticated enough to be art, and pottery was nothing but an unassuming, working-class trade.
It was during Hamada’s time in England that he was exposed to the charm and liveliness of English slipware. He was captivated by the humble, robust pots of the country potters.
Hamada and Leach made some very fine slipware pots in red earthenware, with a traditional lead glaze, during the early years of business in St Ives. With Leach’s first, and arguably most important apprentice, Michael Cardew, they experimented and developed a range of slipware for a short period, before it was replaced with a more robust and resilient stoneware.
Selection of Maruzara and Mamezara, slip trailing with natural ash glazes, 2 x 14 cm
Despite abandoning slipware, Hamada combined some of the techniques with his stoneware pottery, pouring and trailing glazes, demonstrating that tradition never stands still and is constantly developing in response to the needs of the times.
However, the work of the traditional slipware potters resonated profoundly with the ideals of the Mingei movement, which had been recently established in Japan by Hamada’s close friend Soetsu Yanagi.
It embodied the values of craft that Yanagi celebrated in his appreciation of Japanese and Korean folk pottery. They were humble wares, made in volume, with great skill. The pots were affordable enough to be used in the daily lives of the common man, with absolute attention to functionality. Fluid decoration was applied speedily, with honed expertise. What might be considered mistakes in more refined pottery were embraced as part of the process, and a trueness to the materials that added to the humility of the work.
Poster for The Beauty of English Slipware at the Folk Crafts Museum, Mingeikan,Tokyo, 2004
Yanagi visited Leach and Hamada in England and in the subsequent years he and Hamada amassed a collection of English slipware dishes which they took back to Japan. Some pieces were sold in Kyukodo, a gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, and a few were added to the collection of the Mingei Folk Art Museum in Tokyo.
In 2003, curators at the Museum contacted the descendants of the collectors who had bought the dishes at Kyukodo and several were loaned back, to be reunited in an outstanding exhibition of British slipware.
Potters can often cite a moment of magic that changed their lives, when they set eyes on a particular pot that invoked an emotional response in a way that no other had before. It is an epiphany; in that split-second, there is great clarity, and the path to travel becomes suddenly apparent.
I remember this happening to my friend Nic Collins, when he witnessed Shiro Tsujimura’s work for the first time. For me, it was viewing a post-medieval jug in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that moved me to tears.
For Yamada, that moment occurred when his eyes fell upon the poster for the aforementioned exhibition at the Folk Art Museum, entitled The Beauty of English Slipware. The poster bears a rectangular dish with a delightfully stylised bird, slip trailed in white and brown on a black ground, all beneath a rich, golden-yellow, galena glaze. It is indeed a magnificent image, and a copy of the poster has adorned my workshop wall for many years.
Yamada was transfixed.
Large Koro Vase, slip trailing with feldspar powder, natural ash glaze & carbonization, 30 x 33 cm
His fascination with traditional British pottery persisted, and in 2007 he was motivated to travel to England to undertake an apprenticeship with Lisa Hammond.
Upon returning to Japan the following year, he sought employment at Furuya Porcelain Factory, and then, in 2013, he built a kiln in Tashiro, Shigaraki Town, Shiga Prefecture, where he continues to make his extraordinary pottery.
Yamada is one of Japan’s leading exponents of the Yakishime technique, a name which combines the Japanese verb, to fire, yaki, with that of shime, which means to harden.
The unglazed pots are fired for a long period, at a very high temperature, in a kiln fuelled with wood. The heat work from the lengthy firing renders the clay impervious, and the wood ash from the fuel settles on the surfaces of the pots. It melts, due to the high temperatures, and forms areas of glaze that vary from a light sheen to much heavier trickles, depending on the positioning of the pieces in the kiln. Some surfaces are simply matt, granting the naked clay the opportunity to display its variations in colour and shade, from red through a whole range of earth tones, which result from differences in temperature and atmosphere within the kiln chamber.
This is an ancient process that dates to the twelfth century in Yamada’s home region of Shigaraki, where he joins generations of potters that have used the locally found clay deposits to employ this method of making.
That is not to say, however, that Yamada’s work is simple imitation – indeed far from it. He has taken long-established methods, materials and processes, and has successfully fulfilled the most difficult of challenges when using the same basic elements as his forebears: he has developed his own distinctive voice. This is revealed particularly in his expressive and dynamic slip trailed decoration.
His tools are rudimentary. The slip is emitted by gravity, from a tin can, which acts as a reservoir, via a narrow tube, onto the pot. The speed of the hand will dictate the thickness of line: the slower the movement, the more of the fluid will flow onto a particular area. Timing is everything, and Yamada has very evidently mastered this, applying the slip with apparent ease.
There is such joy in Yamada’s deployment of slip, sometimes in the most delicious proportions. The generous boldness of the slip as it is poured across the surface from the trailer captures the rhythmical movements of his body, as fluid, swirling lines wind back and forth and crisscross. Trailing slip in this manner is like a dance, with gentle swaying of the back and flowing movements of the wrist. It is almost meditative and demands absolute focus.
On some pieces, the trailing is much finer, as the loops rise and fall to create meandering patterns, whilst some more formal compositions are in rows, almost replicating Western italic text.
In contrast to the more precise decoration, the unfettered and brave application of broken lines and asymmetric dots on some of his smaller bowls demonstrate the self-assurance of Yamada as a maker.
Maruzara, slip trailing, 2 x 24.5 cm
On dishes where white, conjoined dots are poured onto a black ground, the illusion is created whereby the darker negative spaces become shaped like abstracted stars, switching interplay between background and foreground.
Taller vessels proudly display the earthy qualities of Shigaraki clay, with naturally occurring feldspar inclusions, known as ‘crab eye’, bursting through the surface to produce a white speckled texture. These are randomly overglazed with grey-green, where molten ash deposits flow, to become incidental decoration, formed during the pot’s journey through the kiln. The knowledge of how to set and fire a kiln to achieve such varied effects is the culmination of years of experience.
Yamada is an accomplished thrower, and during his apprenticeship with Lisa Hammond his pots were all wheel-made. The pots in this exhibition, however, are made without use of the potter’s wheel, other than perhaps as a turntable, enabling the pots to be rotated slowly while they are being constructed with coils.
This technique results in slightly asymmetric vessels, with the undulations from the process left evident as the coils are built up and melded together. The organic nature of the pieces is further enhanced by the milky-white feldspar eruptions. Ragged-edged rims bring the pots to their conclusion, softened by heavy ash deposits from the kiln firing.
Large Jug, oiled, 33.5 x 19.5cm
A keen eye for form ensures that Yamada’s pieces quietly command their space without crying out for attention. He produces work which evokes a sense of timelessness. It is tactile and visually rich, skilfully evolved and contemporary, yet it is still firmly built upon the stable foundations of tradition.
In contrast to the flatware, the taller vessels are much closer related to the pots that have been made in the Shigaraki region for centuries. There are glorious Tsubo jars, their rounded bodies culminating in a narrow neck with a flared rim, and the wider mouthed Kame jars, with roughly textured surfaces that appear to be ancient.
I don’t claim to be a scholar of Japanese pottery, and it is simply my own observation that the Tsubo might be considered a ‘standard’ by which a potter’s accomplishment may be judged. Certainly, these are quite spectacular examples.
Rimmed Plate, slip trailing, natural ash glaze, 4.5 x 26.5 cm
This is the first time that Goldmark Gallery has exhibited a body of work from a single maker, made up entirely from hand-built pieces, and Yamada is an inspired choice to premiere the techniques.
It is the formula for a magnificent body of work, where the elements of characterful clay, well-made pots, and deft decoration, together with an intuitive understanding of kiln firing, are brought together.
These are the vital elements which, when combined, infuse the outstanding pottery of Yoji Yamada with its most invaluable quality: integrity.
