December is a month when I feel I can indulge myself a little to take you off-piste, and today it is to share some special ceramics with you. Those of you who know me well, will know that I have had a very diverse life with many interests. While I have always loved textiles, I have always loved ceramics too. It has been my pleasure, long ago, to have known and sometimes managed exhibitions for wonderful potters - including Dame Lucie Rie, when I was taking a maternity sabbatical working for Henry Rothschild at his Primavera Gallery in Cambridge. So there is a ceramic core to my textile heart! Some time ago I visited Japan to pay homage to Bernard Leach's roots with Shoji Hamada at the workshop in Mashiko and since then my love for Japanese ceramics has just grown and grown. When I came across the work recently of a Japanese former anthropology student working in the UK, I was thrilled. Midori Takaki, when she was a child in Japan thought she would become a writer. She says: My head was full of imagination, memories, feelings, thoughts and stories. Once a while, they overtook my daily life. It wasn’t always easy for a child to live in the real world and my own world at the same time. Especially as all my imagination, memories etc. just float around in my head, like clouds in the sky. I didn’t know what to do with them. Now I capture the floating thoughts in ceramics. Once they were given shapes, they become grounded. I create something small almost daily at night. I call them my journal. I am writing in ceramics. By doing that, I file the information, which is, otherwise, difficult to classify, in drawers in my brain. I could bring every nuance and detail of my memories, stories, emotion and thoughts, back to life vividly when I see each sculpture. If you are near Canterbury be sure to visit Midori's exhibition at the Sidney Cooper. To see some of her works for sale, visit her Etsy shop.
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