Fissures and From Wishin

For Akiyama Yo, the creative act consists of causing fissures to form in the surface of clay and attaching meaning to the resulting shapes. To generate those fissures, he makes circles or doughnuts of clay, then plays the flame of a burner over the inside so that the outer surface splits and cracks here and there. For his clay circles, he makes a cut in one place, then alternates flaming the top and bottom surface, so that the clay splits and crevices grow from the induced crack.

Tne Clay body ne works on is formulated to crack easily, but he does not simply let fissures develop randomly ana present the results as finished work. To borrow Akiyama’S words, to extract “a sense of birth and decay” he trains his flame and stream of water on the details, hardening here and dissolving there，much as another artist would work on the fine points in finishing a painting or sculpture．The intensely focused labor built into each piece is one of the factors that gives his work its power.

Akiyama collects intriguing natural forms from his own habitat. More than a source of ideas,  these are a collection of objects that speak to him: exposed on a slope behind his atelier, a spider web, a wasp’ s nest, a shell, a slice of bamboo shoot，an antler that describes an elegant curve. What they have in common is what is called, in mathematics, fractals. Fractal geometry is the construction principle that rules how shapes form in nature.

Since the forms of natural objects have a fractal structure，the pattern of the surface stratum communicates the events within, and it is that interest in form as indicating a relationship between surface and interior that is the basic motif in Akiyama’ S creative work. The fissures in the clay are clues to interior events．

       Hiroshi Sasayama