SOLO SHOW BY KAORI TATEBAYASHI

In this Solo exhibition at Flow gallery Kaori presents a series of ‘Still Lives’, echoing Dutch Masters paintings. Trying to capture light, time and a sense of mortality. The exhibition explores the idea of fragments in time trapped and encased forever as ceramic objects.

Kaori has always been surrounded by ceramics. Born in Arita, Japan the home of Imari porcelain. She grew up in a family that traded pottery. Ceramics had always been a material for tableware and function.

 During her time studying ceramics she explored what else ceramics could be and what this familiar material meant to her. Its paradoxical nature fascinated her, simultaneously having a sense of fragility and permanence.

 “Whatever you make in clay, the time in which the object lived stops with the firing in the kiln. What remains after the firing is the lifeless 'shell' which can be destroyed at once when dropped or stay permanently if kept intact.”

Ceramics resembles ghosts, losing their organic life in the firing. They become a metaphor for memory, traces of the past and a connection between the past and the present. Using their spectral appearance and paradoxical character, Kaori aims to capture time and preserve it within ceramic.