To say that you were an innovator within the ceramic field is a gross understatement. You spent your life’s work exploring the house form, both for its architectural soundness and for its deeper meanings of personal history and self, and found an expansive expression within a narrow but fertile ground. You managed to so successfully translate these ideas from your intimate small works to your monumental sculptures and all the while leaving a wide space for intuition and discovery. Where do we go from here?
— Craig Hartenberger and Renata Cassiano (Letter to Nina Hole)
It is exciting and powerful. One must leave all doubt to the side for a few minutes. The glaze flies to catch itself on the surface or to the side, it matters not…it is not too expensive. These moments do not belong to me.
— Claude Champy
In Bachelard’s insistence of intimacy, spaces create the thresholds between arrival and departure. But in the sculpture of Engelfriet we have a place in between these, a plane of helpless waiting and constant struggle, where things may flow toward you and into you.
— Neil Mansfield on Alexandra Engelfriet’s sculpture at Clay Gulgong 2016
Kaneko has written that the idea of scale exists and develops only in a state of comparison.The giants of folklore are but an extension of the child’s view of the adult form. When I look up at a mountain or a great tree, something spiritual happens within me. Divinity grows out of scale. There would be no gods, that is, without scale. Nor dreams by which to scale them. The architects who built the great cathedrals knew such dreams. So too the artists who turned the bowls for their tea. For where else does sublimity hide if not in the miniscule?
— John Hughes on Jun Kaneko
I also wanted to highlight a question of what Japanese ceramics is: do we define Japanese ceramics based on artists’ nationality or the location where they are based?
— Yoshika Yajima
Instead, to my bewilderment, there was absolutely nothing in the kiln – all I could see was clear across an empty bright glowing space to the brick wall opposite. I recall not breathing for quite a while and making a weird kind of strangled-possum noise.
— Peter Lange