On The Maker

Q Tani

 

Q Tani is a ceramic artist based in Shigaraki. Within the forms of Shigaraki ware, Taniguchi finds a connection with deities, Buddhas, spirits, and the transcendental, as well as their spirituality, rather than an intention directed toward humans.

Historically, Shigaraki ware emerged from the lineages of Sueki, Sanage, and Tokoname. It is an undeniable fact that the forms and techniques born from daily necessities and demands constitute the foundation of Shigaraki ware.

However, what is important is that the connection with the supernatural, which existed like air in the daily lives of that era (the medieval period), and the existence of deities and Buddhas, which were inseparably bound to their desperate livelihood, must have penetrated into the forms as well.

Unlike the beauty of Sueki, which was related to state-controlled rituals, this is the "beauty of the peasantry." In this regard, technical constraints are a trivial matter; rather, what is crucial is the spirituality of the potters (the peasants) of that time who accepted that specific form as "their own form."

To fashion tools for daily life without artifice or calculation. It was a desperate activity for survival and a mere labor. Therefore, there was almost no room for the consciousness of pursuing "beauty" to intervene. Yet, precisely because there was no consciousness of beauty, there is a beauty that conversely overflows from within. This is not "the beauty generated simply by making things seriously and carefully." Instead, it is a beauty generated by feeling the presence of deities and Buddhas close by, by the existence of clean air and water, and by having gratitude for the fact that one is "sustained by life."

As indicated by the verses of Sugawara no Michizane, spirits certainly existed close to people in those days.

A condition in which the act of "making things" is inevitably and deeply intertwined with gratitude and prayers toward nature and the transcendental. Without such conditions that existed in the medieval period, can we modern people truly create objects where "the simplicity of the peasantry" and "the presence of spirits" are bound together? Can there exist tools in the modern era that reach us only after detouring through the existence of spirits?

It seems as though Q Tani's work is posing such a question to us today.