Toshiko Takaezu, Crater Moon

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0:00:04.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the galleries at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, looking at one extraordinary and very unusual, I can’t quite call it a “pot” as I would almost any other piece of ceramic, because it has no visible opening. It is a completely closed sphere.

0:00:24.7 Dr. Jen Padgett: This is Crater Moon by the artist Toshiko Takaezu. Takaezu was born in Hawaiʻi to parents that were from Okinawa, Japan, and her earliest training was in utilitarian wares or functional ceramics. But from that early training, learning how to make cups, teapots, bowls, she began to experiment with the sculptural possibilities of ceramics, challenging the belief that ceramics should be functional.

0:00:53.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: The surface is absolutely gorgeous, but it’s so complicated. You can make out the matte surface of the fired clay itself, where the glaze is not completely wrapped around the object. And then there are delicate areas that are so fitting for the title “Crater Moon” because they are like craters with little edges that seem so fragile. And it does absolutely remind me of the surface of the moon.

0:01:18.3 Dr. Jen Padgett: Takaezu worked in a variety of materials. So, she did weavings and paintings, work in bronze, but it was that opportunity to create a really rich textured surface across a three-dimensional form that compelled her. She once said when comparing painting to ceramics, “I didn’t want a flat surface to work on, but a three-dimensional one.”

0:01:38.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: So, this is painting on a spherical canvas. And in fact, in documentary film of her glazing, she works the surface with a kind of quickness and sureness that is remarkable. It is as if she’s painting like an Abstract Expressionist.

0:01:54.9 Dr. Jen Padgett: She once described, “You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it contains a spirit and is alive.”

0:02:12.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: At the wheel, she talked about the way in which the clay had a life of its own; that she had to be, in a sense, gentle in terms of asserting her intention, because she wanted to listen to what the clay itself had to say. And then that was true again in the glazing, and I think especially in the firing. There is something wonderful and mysterious about what happens in the kiln. You load the kiln up, you’ve glazed your ceramics, you break it up, you light the fire, and then you have to wait. And when the kiln is disassembled and the pieces are taken out, I think the artist had a tremendous reverence for the chance, and in a sense, almost for the intention that the kiln had brought to the piece itself.

0:02:53.4 Dr. Jen Padgett: Takaezu was interested in those elements of chance, or the idea that the work wasn’t just created through her determination; that there was this back and forth with nature.

0:03:02.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And throughout her career, especially in the latter decades, she brought other people into that process. Her studio became a place where she brought her students. She was a professor at Princeton University for many decades.

0:03:15.1 Dr. Jen Padgett: Takaezu’s home and studio in Quakertown, New Jersey was perhaps one of the best contexts to see her work, not only because of the beautiful natural surroundings, but also because of these rich groupings where she would often have a cluster of works together. And the opportunity to see them all in relation to each other was one of the things that really makes them dynamic, and gives that sense of a dialogue between the works.

0:03:38.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that’s true even in this exhibition at Crystal Bridges, where we see, not one, but actually two of the moons set in front of these taller, thinner works.

0:03:48.6 Dr. Jen Padgett: For the tall forms, those closed forms, you could see rings and get a sense of her working on the wheel; so, she would’ve thrown these on a potter’s wheel. In contrast, the moons were works that she made using molds; so, creating large slabs of clay within molds that she then allowed to dry the two halves and then connect.

0:04:07.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: But of course, these are stoneware, so they’re heated to a very high temperature in a kiln, and you can’t have a truly closed form. And so in this case, just underneath there is a small aperture, which would’ve allowed the hot gases to escape during its firing.

0:04:22.7 Dr. Jen Padgett: The environment of the kiln can be both exciting in terms of the transformation in materials that happens, and then also potentially disastrous when something, maybe a work that was so carefully made, cracks or explodes within the kiln. So, by having that small hole, that aperture for the gas to escape, lessens the risk of a potential catastrophe.

0:04:44.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And it’s a reminder that each work of ceramic is, in some ways, a small miracle: that it has survived its time in the kiln.

0:04:52.1 Dr. Jen Padgett: She would return to the same kinds of forms. So, the closed forms and the moons as two examples, but each one is different. Each one is unique, not only because of the way that she made it and glazed it, but also because of those effects from the kiln.

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This work at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Learn more about the artist from the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation

Watch a short interview with Toshiko Takaezu

Glenn Adamson, Dakin Hart, and Kate Wiener, editors, Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024).

Peter Held, editor, The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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