Last weekend, I went to Okinawa with my daughter.
It was for the ‘Okinawa Ceramic Art Exhibition’ held at the Naha Culture and Arts Theatre and the Naha City Tsuboya Pottery Museum.
It was a joint exhibition of works by one of the artists I most admire, ceramic artist Jissei Omine, and his disciples.
The work ‘Katachi’ (my daughter was fascinated by this work), which trembled and tried to move, and ‘Izumi’, which erupted from the earth. An overwhelming group of works in which powerful, imaginative landscapes emerge before your eyes.
With this feeling, I visited Omine’s studio in Yomitan Village, pottery sanctuary.
When I spoke to Mr.Omine last year, he told me that this might be his last exhibition, but when I met him again, he was in very good health and working on a large piece of pottery in his studio (he said “I’m just playing with the clay”) and I spent a very happy time with my daughter.
I printed his portrait that I took last year in my darkroom. It was nice to be able to give him that photo with my thanks.
A small ‘Genki Dama’ (pottery made from a mixture of Okinawan soil and silica sand collected from uplifted reefs), which had just come out of the kiln, was presented to us, and this made my daughter, who had been feeling a little under the weather the day before, feel completely better.
On the last day, the sky was clear and the East China Sea was bright and clear. The blue colour created by Mr.Omine remains in my heart.