""People think the great Japanese craft was made by unknown artists. It's not artists, it's more like craftsmen," he says. "So, a craft piece: there's no need to mention who made it or something like that.""
""So then I started to think about where I came from and what I learned and what I encountered and why I was in the U.S.," he says. "That was kind of a story that I simply collected about why I wanted to make work.""
""People were rolling coils to build pots" thousands of years ago, Iwamura explains. "I'm still doing the same thing. It's traditional.""
Iwamura connects traditional Japanese mingei values of anonymous craftsmanship with personal narrative informed by U.S. audiences' interest in artist identity. He uses ancient coil-building techniques that link his work to global ceramic histories. The sculptures present playful, simplified faces, rounded figures resembling snowmen or ghosts, and forms evoking mountains or clouds. Layered paint beneath glaze produces shifting hues depending on viewpoint. Added surface lines reference Jomon pots, African masks, and Mexican crafts. In installations he employs the Japanese concept of Ma, treating negative space as time, space, and relational interval between objects.
Read at Hi-Fructose Magazine - The New Contemporary Art Magazine
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