Beautiful form that creates a sense of tension

A young ceramic artist based in Gifu Prefecture,Yosuke YamauraYosuke Yamaura (Yamaura Yosuke) is an artist who traverses the categories of design, crafts, and art, which may seem close but far apart.

The pieces, which are hand-crafted over a vast amount of time using porcelain, a difficult-to-handle material, are inspired by the tension inherent in both man-made and natural objects, such as weapons and shells. It appeals to the viewer what crafts are and the value that exists between technology and art.

Yamaura has been interested in manufacturing since childhood, so he enrolled in the Faculty of Design at Shizuoka University of Arts and Culture and studied product design. There, I learned a lot about product design for corporate products. However, I was not satisfied with design expressions that solve specific problems using only human thinking.

While searching for a genre that handles materials that don't turn out as planned and that cannot be completed by one person alone, he came across ceramics. Although pottery makes full use of thought and technology, the final completion requires an element of leaving it to nature. After graduating from university, he entered the Tajimi City Ceramic Design Institute in Gifu Prefecture to learn ceramic art from scratch, where he acquired specialized techniques for porcelain and casting.

During this time, he began to question the hierarchical structure of crafts and art, and began to search for a way to express crafts and art without any superiority or inferiority. Since Yamaura studied product design at university, he had a habit of thinking about artistic things in terms of functionality, and finding artistry in functional things as well. The work that was created as a result of aiming to create genre-less work that integrates product designers, artists, and craftsmen has led to the current style.

Straight-line weapons such as spears and curved lines of seashells create a sense of sculptural beauty that eliminates unnecessary waste, both man-made and natural. A sense of tension is created from the exquisite balance of horizontal and vertical overlapping in a variety of ways, similar to modern architecture. In order to reproduce these motifs, Yamaura creates detailed blueprints before touching the soil, and creates works using a casting technique that involves layering plaster plates. Unlike china clay, white porcelain is soft and extremely difficult to handle, so it requires a high sense of artistic balance.

The finished work reveals a sense of tension created by the sharp edges and the overlapping of horizontal and vertical lines in the all-white shape. Yamaura's sculptural beauty, which creates a sense of tension, is already attracting keen attention from both Japan and abroad, regardless of the field.

B-OWND