Jim Keeling talks Koichiro Isezaki pottery - GOLDMARK.TV

Yeah, all pots make different noises. Well, it's a great pleasure to be here at the Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham today. Mike asked me to come and talk about Koichiro Izazaki's pots, which is a great honour and an even greater pleasure for me. I've known Koichiro personally for probably 15 years, and over the years I've got to know him very well. He's a most delightful person, as indeed is his father, Jun Sensei, who is the living national treasure in Bizen. I'm Jim Keeling from Witchford Pottery in Warwickshire. What's really important about Bizenware is to understand that the main characteristic of it comes not from the maker, but from the kiln. Japan always has this rather different way from us. We think, have a good idea, how do we do it? They think, no. First, material. Get to know the material. Second, get to know the process. I've mastered the material in as much as you can master clay. I understand the process. This will lead me to design things which actually bring out the character of the material and the process. This is quite different to how we think. I'm often commissioned by really good artists to make things that they've had the idea for, and to try and transfer them into clay, often quite difficult. This other way has always really interested me. When I first went to Japan, knowing nothing about Japanese pots, they were buying a lot of my pots, I saw Bizenware and I thought, well, this is absolutely fantastic. I love that slightly impersonal way of seeing the pot. That is to say, it's not egoful. It comes from a very deep respect for the material world, which I presume has a lot to do with Shinto. It is definitely something we can learn from in the West, because as everyone is now realizing, you can't treat the material world as inexhaustible. What Koichiro is doing here in all these pots is making a form which comes out of the clay and then putting it into the fire. And you'll see all these marks you can see on the clay, they all come from one type of kiln. This is a very simple kiln, it's called an anagama kiln, which basically just means kamae's kiln or kamae's kiln. It just means a whole kiln. The main characteristic of an anagama kiln is that it is one directional. The flame starts here, travels along the tube and out of the chimney. That's one direction. The side of the pot which is near the firebox, facing the firebox, facing the flame, is going to get completely blasted. The other side, in the shadow, will get almost nothing happening to it. This kind of kiln went out of fashion as a result quite quickly, in about 1600, because they realized that if you put various walls up the kiln, you can make the kiln go up and down, that's called a noborigama, a multi-chamber kiln, and you get a much more even firing. If you want to glaze something, if you want a nice glazed rice bowl, you don't want one side of it completely blasted and the other under-fired, because you want the glaze to be all nice and even. So glazeware doesn't do very well in anagamas. Bizan never did glaze, so they kept the anagama tradition going for a lot longer than anywhere else. In fact, they kept it going until about 1880. I've done quite a lot of research on this. Then they finally went over to multi-chambered kilns. They started making bricks. They'd never made bricks before, they'd made slabs, but never bricks, and they lost the art of anagama firing. Jun-sensei and his brother and his father, in about 1960, were clearing some land behind their house on a slope, and they came across an old anagama kiln with part of its arch still standing. So they decided to rebuild it and reinvent how you fired it. In fact, what happened was the father then tragically died quite young, and that was left to Jun-sensei and his brother to work out, through many trials and errors, how you fire an anagama kiln. So it is a reinvented tradition. So this pot here, as you see, quite complicated. I'm talking about the glaze finish, the firing finish. You can see here, this is all fly ash, which has settled here and come down. So I know that's the most fly ash there, and here on this shoulder. So that must have been facing the fire. Let's just check, because around the other side should be in the shadow. Ah, and that is in the shadow. This has really been protected from the flame. This is just lovely bizen, beautifully prepared clay. I would guess, without wanting to give too many secrets away, that this has been fired in a saga. It's been fired in another pot to stop too much ash coming in, settling on these rims. Toicho wanted this plain. He wanted you to see the movement of the clay. The bottom has these rather extraordinary marks on it. So what he's done is he's sat it in a saga, in another big pot, on a bed of rice straw. Rice straw is very high in silica and other things, and it melts. So here was a great pad of rice straw with a few straggly bits in the bottom of the saga, and you've got this very beautiful pale clay. This I know comes from very near the front of the kiln, I should say, fairly high up. It's not got any evidence of anything other than heavy ashing, and it's been put on three stilts like that. So there you go, that's facing, you are the fire, that's facing the fire. So around the back, it's dribbling down the back, and it's so near the front that it's even there, it's got the flame coming round, and you can see, I can see on the inside that it's got no glaze on the inside, but that's very near the front of the kiln in an oxidised position. And you can see what Koichi was doing, he's designing forms to actually take the different effects of the kiln. Here's one which you can see all the different colours from being buried in, so it's buried that way up, with something, probably a little yunomi or something there, a pad there, and it's, you can see the reduction there, where they've fallen like that, the bits of wood, so there's a little gap there, so that you don't get this very roughness where the actual charcoal was on it, but you get a little bit of space, but it's heavily reduced in the ash, turning that lovely grey colour. So this is, definitely has no effect of reduction or fire or anything, this is a different colour isn't it? So how's that been achieved? Well if you turn over the other side, you'll see something rather remarkable. So this rather, slightly rough texture, I can tell you when this came out of the kiln, this would have had embers, charcoal, bits of half burnt wood, all sorts of detritus on it, it would have had to have been washed and scrubbed with some emery paper to get back to this surface, because this has been laying in the bottom of one of the fireboxes. So you've got your long tube, your laid down chimney of anagama, you can get it really hot at one end, that'll take you, in Koichiro's case, seven days, okay, you've got this great ball of heat, but at the far end, it's only just glowing red, you've got to do an immense amount of work to get up to temperature at that end, which is miles away from your fire, your fire's really hot and everything near it, like this is getting completely roasted, but at the far end it's only just glowing red, nothing's melted or anything like that. So what do you do? About every six feet, you've got little side holes in the kiln, and when you're ready at the front, you open the side holes and start putting little sticks in, and you've got a trench across the kiln, which hasn't got any pots in, and you tempt the fire, which you've built up, this great ball of heat, you tempt this ball of heat up the kiln by putting fire in front of it, and it comes up, sucks up, and it starts going like a, it kind of rolls the fire up, when that one's getting ready, you open the next two holes and roll it up, the next two holes, next two, and for 24 hours you roll the fire up the hill, halfway up you'll close up the front, and it'll start cooling down quite rapidly. Now I said there were no pots in those fireboxes halfway up, and a third of the way, two thirds of the way up, but in actual fact you can put things in the bottom of them, bit risky, because you're chucking wood on top of them, but if you do, this is what happens, that's where the embers built up, and underneath you get these very beautiful colours, you get this little grey, you get these oranges, and you get this beautiful, with different clays give you different colours, but the Bizane clay is beautiful, and you can see that this, this has cooled down quite quickly, so it's gone that colour, and you get these lovely grey edges, which is heavily reduced, because there's no chance of any oxygen getting down there, because it's underneath a foot of charcoal. I found myself saying to Mike the other day, there's something about this pot, where it starts with great firmness, goes through a very simple ellipse, and comes back with equal firmness to the end, it never stops being both simple and firm, and that is a very, very difficult thing to achieve, it is also extremely full, if you look at the, if you look at the form of it, there is actually the tiniest foot ring here, it's so small, it's probably one millimetre in height, but it's doing an incredibly important job, because if I put it on a shelf, this beautiful voluptuous round form is just infinitesimally raised up, so although that has quite a lot of lift in it, over a tiny amount, it's keeping the lift, and that's remarkable, but also it gives the whole form, if you can hold this, you'd understand, this is a very full pot, it's absolutely full, it's designed for the tea ceremony, so it fits in the hand, it's going to be passed to you, probably without facing you, you're going to take it, you're going to rotate it twice, and then, excuse anyone who knows about tea ceremony, because I'm not very good at it, you will then have the place to drink from, okay, there's a whole set way of using these bowls, but the thing I wanted to point out, was that when you've finished, and you've drunk your tea, done all the right ceremonial things, it's your job to turn over the pot, and look at the base, and now this is a bit of a mystery to pretty well everyone, what makes a good base, but the most important thing is that when you turn it over, you are not disappointed, doesn't matter how good the tea bowl is, if the base isn't satisfying, it's worthless, so here we have this foot ring, which only just exists one millimetre high, and you turn over, and it's a beautifully strong, simple, it's almost like a belly button, isn't it, I mean, it's something quite sort of primal about it, in this beautiful shape, very simple, look how simple that is, I mean, you can't get much simpler than that, this one has been laying on straw, and you can see that the straw has actually formed a bit of a sort of glaze, and it's stuck a few little bits of sand down, which are then being carefully rubbed off when it comes out of the kiln, really interesting about what Koichiro is doing with this technique, is that he's throwing the pot extremely thin, very, very thin, and I'm not quite sure how he does it, he's throwing it very, very thin, about like that, he's then pushing it out slightly, and because it's so thin, this will come down and begin to collapse, okay, so it's a, he's throwing it about like that, straight out from the inside, and it collapses, and you get this extraordinary moment when you get this, I mean, it's a very natural thing, it's the sort of thing that happens in nature, it's to do with the thinness, it's speaking of thinness, because this is quite heavy pot, but the top is wafer thin, and it's undulating and moving in the way things do in nature, when they're very thin, and the wind gets them, or the water gets them, so I think that's lovely. So, to conclude, we've got sort of the same pot, but with completely different, this one has got black slip on it, I admit, but they are in different parts of the kiln, just getting completely different effects, and it gives a very different feel, you might want to use them at different seasons, different times of day, they're, they suggest all sorts of different things, and that's what Koichiro's pots are so good at, to me they, they take you on a journey, reading the landscape, as Japanese would say, understanding how they've come to be like that, a bit, by where they're in the kiln, because Koichiro's taking you on a journey, he's taking the clay with, we haven't talked about that, he's taking the clay with extreme love, and he's working in a very meditative way, he takes his job absolutely seriously, and again this is something which is quite difficult to approach as a Westerner, there is no irony in art in Japan, you put absolutely everything you've got into the work, in a, I tend to say a religious way, because that's the nearest we would get to it in, in the West I think, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, this is a vocation, and that comes through in the seriousness of these pots, these are pots which are dedicated to bringing out the truth of both the material and the process, and Koichiro's ego is well in check, I can see his personality coming out, I can see the influences he's using, changing around, all those things, and I'm not denying that they are completely his, but there's something much deeper than that which we all share, so I do highly recommend his pots to you, and spend a lot of time looking at them, and feeling them, and being with them, there you go.