A warm remark she heard in high school — you have a talent for this — was what pushed Nishi into the world of ceramics. She honed her technique at art college and at a vocational training school, and what she arrived at was a softness like cloth living inside hard-fired pottery, along with pastel colours that brighten a table at a glance. We went to find the feel of the vessels made in her quiet studio, and the gentle story behind them.
"You have a good eye" — making things began with a few magic words
The origin of the potter now sitting quietly at her wheel goes back to high school. Unsure which direction to take, she wandered into an open day at an art university. She tried ceramics there for the first time, and an instructor told her she had a good eye. That was where everything started.
"The happiness of being praised that day has stayed with me ever since. It's still what I centre myself on," she says calmly.
She studied three-dimensional form and sculptural expression at a junior college of the arts in Nara, then learned the fundamentals of wheel work at a vocational training school in Kyoto. After that she learned crispness of form, and how to carry herself as an artist, under a more senior maker — and then went independent.
Putting a softness like cloth into a hard material
Touch one of her pieces and, along with the warmth of the clay, you feel a pleasant, rounded weight that settles into your hand. How do you make a hard material like ceramic look soft? It is a question she has been pursuing without a break since she was a student.
When a design stalls, she says, what she opens is the sketchbook she kept in those student years.
"When you've been making for a long time, ease of use inevitably takes priority and your ideas can harden up. But those old sketches are full of free ideas that aren't bound by any framework. I take hints from my past self and bring them down into shapes that suit life as it is now."
Behind forms that are genuinely easy to use and yet somehow loveable in their roundness and gentleness, that back-and-forth is quietly at work.
Pastels arrived at by trial and error, lighting up a table
What draws out the appeal of these vessels most is their finely judged pastel colour. To make the colours come up cleanly, she deliberately chooses semi-porcelain clay, which fires bright and white. Applying different glazes to the inside and the outside is careful work that takes two days, with attention paid to temperature and humidity throughout.
The pastel pink took the most trial and error of all: a colour she reached only after changing the mix again and again. Rather than relying on numbers from a machine, she works by feeling the consistency with her own hands.
"Subdued traditional pottery is lovely too, but what I want to offer is the fun of serving food on something cute. Even with a sweet treat at lunchtime, or an everyday simmered dish — I'd be happy if my work could be the kind of thing that brightens a whole room just by being set down on the table."
Close to daily life, and still loved ten years from now
So that a piece can be picked up freely every day, she never neglects lightness either, thinking through the balance of weight in relation to each form.
Because she treasures the small thrill of collecting colours and motifs she loves herself, she hopes the people who use her work will enjoy the time spent choosing, too — wondering which colour to go for.
"There are minute differences in form and expressions of colour that only handwork gives you, things you won't find in mass production. I want to keep enjoying making pieces that people still feel fond of in ten or twenty years — that they still look at and think, yes, this one really is lovely."
From muny: a note for you
Nishi's vessels have a finely judged lightness and a rounded form that seems to soften your mood the moment you pick one up. That warmth — a table brightening the instant food goes onto it — is something only handwork produces. As a treat for yourself, of course, but also as a gift for someone important who is starting a new chapter at home: do choose a pastel you love.
