Along with "Light Vessels," another subject I've been creating for over 10 years is a series of works featuring bowls, including "Black Bowls."

It was Koetsu who first inspired me to create a bowl.

There are many reasons why I am drawn to Koetsu's numerous tea bowls: their inimitable originality, the uniqueness of each one being the same, the alluring charm unique to pottery, and so on. The list goes on and on, but I feel like none of them can adequately express it.

I was certainly drawn to something indescribable about his tea bowl.

My initial intention in creating the "black bowl" was to try to express this feeling, which is akin to longing, through my own hands, and to see if I could interpret the existence of a tea bowl in a new way.

In the beginning, I used techniques like carbonized black pottery to control the shape and color, thereby creating my own unique outline for tea bowls.

Looking at it now, it's quite rigid, but you can see the intention to somehow capture the form.

Lately, I've been consciously increasing the amount of time I spend creating in places other than my own studio, and also firing my work in wood-fired kilns that I don't normally use.

As I twist the clay in different places and with different materials, I find myself facing the clay with a fresh perspective, completely disregarding the methods I thought I had built up over time regarding how to handle materials and my own view of pottery.

Pottery existed there as well.

Then, one's own reaction to the phenomena and facts that appear before their eyes is presented as the finished bowl.

By increasing my experiences of confronting ceramics with a different sensibility than when creating "light vessels," I hope to deepen my own answer to the fundamental question of what ceramics mean to me in a multi-layered way.

Akio Niisato