Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists

This talk with Alice North and Louise Allison Cort, presents a new book Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists, by Alice North, Halsey North and Louise Allison Cort. This is the first book to tell the stories of 16 revered Japanese ceramic artists in their own words. These celebrated artists with unparalleled skill and creative brilliance range in age from 94 to 64. They embody the diverse experiences of several generations who have been active and successful from the late 1940s to the present day, a period of massive change. Now, sharing their stories for the first time in this groundbreaking volume, they not only describe their unique processes, inspirations, and relationships with clay, but together trace a seismic cultural shift through a field in which centuries-old but exclusionary potting traditions opened to new practitioners and kinds of practices. Significantly, the book includes conversations with artists born into pottery-making families and with the fir