Akira Satake Workshop
Inspired by Nature - 2010
Akira Satake leads a three-day, hands-on workshop focusing on slab construction techniques and Kohiki slip decorating for creating functional pottery forms. Participants will learn to work both with soft and hard slabs, exploring a variety of processes and techniques to create teapots, tea cups, pitchers, vases, boxes, and other functional pottery.
Akira will share his experience and understanding in a discussion of the Japanese aesthetic. Participants will gain insight in finding the beauty in imperfection, the meaning of "wabi-sabi", and the importance of "ma" the space in between. Akira will demonstrate his style of making tea ceremony bowls, water jars, and ikebana vases, all influenced by Japanese pottery from the Momoyama Period of 1568-1615.
Participants will learn to create rich surfaces that evoke telltale signs left by the forces of nature on the world we experience. To accomplish this, Akira will share his Kohiki technique for enhancing surface by brushing white porcelain slip onto a dark clay body, then stretching the clay to crack and distort the brushmarks. The result is a uniquely compelling surface that warrants extended reflection while adding layers of meaning to already strong forms.
Akira is also an internationally acclaimed musician whose CD "Cooler Heads Prevail" was awarded the prestigious German Music Critics Award for Best World Music Recording. He will close the workshop with a brief mini-concert performed on shamisen and banjo.
Class size 18.
Free to the public
September 24-26
10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Akira Satake Bio
Born in Osaka, Japan, the artist has been living in the U.S. since 1983 and has won numerous awards here for both visual and music. In 2003 he relocated from Brooklyn, New York to Swannanoa, North Carolina, where he built a Japanese Kyushu-style oil kiln and a wood-fired kiln.
Akira has recently exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, the Mint Museum Potter's Market Invitational, and The Smithsonian Craft Show. He recently received a National Award for Excellence in Contemporary Clay, and had one of his works purchased for the Mint Museum's permanent collection. He is a member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild and Piedmont Craftsmen.
Akira Satake Artist Statement
For me, the act of creation is a collaboration between myself, the clay and the fire. Collaboration means finding what the clay wants to be and bringing out its beauty in the way that the beauty of our surroundings is created through natural forces. Undulations in sand that has been moved by the wind, rock formations caused by landslides, the crackle and patina in the wall of an old house, all these owe their special beauty to the random hand of Nature. The fire is the ultimate random part of the collaborative equation. I hope the fire will be my ally, but I know it will always transform the clay in ways I cannot anticipate.
