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Ceramic Review is the magazine for contemporary and historical ceramics, ceramic art and pottery.


Ceramic Review Issue 331

January/February 2025

Akiko Hirai’s explosive pots have won her worldwide acclaim. Emma Crichton-Miller delves into her background and practice

Today, Akiko Hirai is one of the best-known potters working in the UK. Her explosive moon jars, delicate pod vessels, contemplative bowls and teapots, and groups of monochrome faceted bottles each reflect different aspects of her increasingly adventurous technical virtuosity, all in the service of her distinctive, subtle sensibility.

Hirai works out of the Chocolate Factory in Stoke Newington, London, where she first found a space in 2003. She was drawn there by the presence of a gas kiln, essential for her palette of muted, organic colours. Success has seen her spill out from a corner of a shared studio into two studio spaces, one above the other, with the Polish-born ceramic artist Aneta Regel as her neighbour; Hirai has no desire to leave. She cites her daily routine – an early morning swim, the walk to work across Hackney, the community of the studio – as her primary sources of inspiration.

CAREER CHOICES

When Hirai arrived in London from Japan in the mid 1990s, she had no notion that she was to become a potter. She had taken a degree in psychology and, having resigned from a job in advertising, which she hated, decided to visit her sister who was studying photography in London, and learn some English. It was London that first seduced her. ‘I just liked the environment I was in. Mixing with different people from different countries, which I had never done before,’ she explains.

To prolong her stay, Hirai took a year’s volunteering job in a homeless hostel in Northampton, hoping to improve her English. After eight months, however, she was mentally exhausted, struggling with both the language and the enormity of the challenges faced by the hostel’s clients. An alternative plan began to form in her mind, of applying to study for a Psychology MA. But first, just for fun, she took a short course in pottery.

This was Hirai’s first direct encounter with clay. As she puts it: ‘Like most Japanese people, I like ceramics and was surrounded by them at home but I never thought of making them myself.’ Her grandmother was a teacher of the tea ceremony, which in Hirai’s home province of Shizuoka in Japan, renowned for its green tea, required the steeping of green tea leaves in a teapot rather than the mixing of matcha in a bowl.

She went back to Japan and while earning money to fund her dream of returning to England to study, the idea grew that she might take an arts foundation course rather than the MA in Psychology for which she had already won a place. She realised that, at nearly 30, this might be the last chance she had to change direction. In the end, Hirai returned to London, took some preliminary private pottery lessons from Chris Bramble in Hampstead, before studying first ceramics at the University of Westminster, Harrow, and then design at Central Saint Martins. 

BUILDING HER PRACTICE

Her pragmatic decision to study design only confirmed her commitment to one-off making. ‘I am not attracted to something that I am not going to make. I do not have an eye. To mass produce ceramics you have to take out all the things I like,’ Hirai explains. These include spontaneity and the opportunities for accidents.

For her final year dissertation, Hirai researched the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, moving beyond the lifestyle clichés to explore in depth the history of this philosophy of imperfection in both Korean and Japanese aesthetics. For her, it is epitomised by the Korean Moon Jar in the British Museum – the example bequeathed by the Bernard Leach Estate and for many years loaned by Leach to Lucie Rie. Hirai loved it from before she had ever touched clay. ‘It is old, it has chips and stains and speckles – and it has a joint line, and all these things that mean it is not perfect,’ she reveals.

It was thus with her moon jars that Hirai began to build her practice. Rather than use porcelain however – ‘I don’t like the very pure white porcelain’ – she decided to use a darker stoneware body, covered with a white slip, before firing the jar in a weak reduction atmosphere so that the background colour comes through. This is a technique used in Japanese Kohiki ware. For Hirai, the random colouring and uneven texture that results are a metaphor for all planetary life.

‘Imperfection is a mark of an event in the past. So, I make a mark and put a lot of stress onto the pot to see how it will withstand the stress, either a chemical change within the body or glaze, or a superficial change of texture, a crack or an indentation. We are born quite pure and then experiences make you what you are. All these things on the pot are like actual events,’ she explains.

The base materials Hirai uses for her moon jars do not change, but by changing the thickness of glaze or clay or the environment, she can create a lot of variety, ‘which is’, as she puts it, ‘exactly the same as human life.’

INFLUENTIAL EXPERIENCES

As she has expanded her studio space, so she has begun to create larger vessels with exuberant exploded surfaces, their birth on the wheel and journey through the kiln dramatised by the swirling glazes, in turn inspired by swimming. Her courage and daring have grown. ‘From all these experiences and many disasters, I know what you can and what you can’t do and how the material and glazes will react in that particular environment, so it has become more controllable,’ she explains.

Alongside the trademark moon jars, Hirai has developed several other significant bodies of work. Her evocative handbuilt ‘pod’ pots, with their small openings, thin skins and rough slip-covered surfaces were inspired by a group exhibition at Flow Gallery on the theme of plants. Out of these have developed her striking tripod vessels, sculptural and sensual, which echo both seed pods and ancient water containers.

However, Hirai is clear that she is not interested in making sculpture. ‘I like the humble character of domestic things,’ she reveals. ‘Sculpture is too self-centred to me. It makes me feel very tired because the maker imposes themselves too much. But if it is a pot, a pot has a role,
a pot has a function, and that is the major thing about the pot. It does not say, look at me.’

On the other hand, Hirai’s distinctive ‘Morandi’ bottles, grouped in clusters of black or white, are a direct homage to the 20th-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. The shapes, with their elongated necks and animated postures, leaning sometimes towards each other like people, are derived partly from Morandi but also partly from the bottles Hirai sees littered on the streets on her way to work.

She plays with the faceting of the bottles, so that some are only half faceted, as if they have come alive from a painting, with just one face to the world, as well as with their placing. ‘Because they are inspired by Morandi, I am quite aware of the negative space, how it is constructed and how you can see the outlines, so some people say it looks like a landscape,’ she says. She likes to think of their owners imagining they are inside a painting.

Hirai also makes beautiful tableware – Japanese-inspired teapots with distinctive profiles and faceted sides  based on custard apples, plates with wood-ash glazes and, more recently, large ceramic light shades with custard apple markings. All are marked by her originality, her experimental approach to technique and her commitment to her vocation. She says of her life choices: ‘Now I am happy. I have a community. I have very nice customers and gallerists who have supported me for years. The work itself is completely up to me. I take 100% responsibility for what I do, which suits me.’ 

 

For more information visit akikohiraiceramics.com. Sleep On It, Contemporary Ceramics, 17 October–9 November; contemporaryceramics.uk