A quiet studio in Kyoto: soft light, still air, and a comedy radio show murmuring in the background. The story of the woman kneading clay here begins with something that has nothing to do with efficiency or calculation — a pure impulse.
From an office job in Tokyo to ceramics, and then to an apprenticeship under one of Kyoto's best-known potters.
She treats her late start as room to grow, and deliberately keeps choosing the harder technique. We asked Natsumi Ishii about the feeling she pours into her softly white kohiki ware.
"My curiosity just wouldn't stop" — an impulse beyond reason
There was nothing careful or calculated about the way she chose ceramics. In her twenties, cooking led her to notice the vessels she was cooking for, and while working an office job in Tokyo, her curiosity about how a piece of pottery is actually made kept growing.
"You only get one life. I'd rather do something and regret it than never do it and regret that."
Carried by that conviction, she enrolled at a ceramics school back home in Kyoto — a start more than ten years later than most of her peers. She had never once imagined she could become a potter. She simply loved vessels, and the urge to get close to what lay behind them refused to go away. That straightforward energy is still what drives her work today.
Choosing the hardest road on purpose: the wheel, and what "cool" means to her
After graduating, she trained under a potter counted among the most technically accomplished in Kyoto. Her teacher had been at the wheel since high school and shaped vessel after vessel as lightly as someone humming a tune. Faced with that level of talent and skill, she spent her days feeling hopelessly clumsy by comparison. And still, the path she chose was the wheel — the steepest one available.
There are plenty of more efficient ways to make a vessel, moulds among them. But she holds on to something simple: watching her teacher throw beautifully on the wheel looked, to her, like the coolest thing in the world.
On a scale of one to ten, she says, she isn't even at five yet. Knowing that, she throws anyway — one step at a time, tasting her own progress as it comes. That pursuit of not efficiency but a way of working she believes is worth admiring is exactly what shows up in the way her pieces hold themselves.
Failures that make you shout out loud — and why she keeps applying slip raw
If one thing has become her signature, it is kohiki: a white slip-coated ware whose surface holds a soft, moist quality. To arrive at that white, she commits to a high-risk technique called namagesho — applying the slip while the clay is still raw.
The usual approach is to fire a piece once to harden it before pouring on the white slip, and done that way almost nothing goes wrong. She instead applies the slip to pieces just trimmed and still half-dry. The water in the slip can soften the clay and bring the form down with it. When something she has built with care collapses in front of her, she says, the shock is enough to make her yell out loud, alone in the studio.
She stays with the method because she believes in a moist, quiet lustre that seems to rise from within — something a once-fired piece can never give her. A failure is her own inexperience taking visible form; which means the only thing to do is make another. She trusts that repetition to make her better. It is, in her own way, an aesthetics of growth.
Comedy radio, and the pleasure of a vessel that grows with you
There is always a comedy radio show playing in her studio. A few middle-aged comedians cackling away as her soundtrack, sometimes an onigiri rice ball in one hand as she works. Because her pieces come out of that unguarded, ordinary daily rhythm, they settle onto our own tables without fuss.
Her kohiki is also a vessel that grows alongside the person using it. It takes in water, and its colour shifts the more it is used. She hopes people will read that not as staining but as evidence of the time they have spent together. If you want to keep it looking pristine for years, the trick is to run it briefly under water before use — though she laughs that she just uses hers hard, exactly as it is. That easy generosity has a way of lowering the barrier to using a handmade vessel at all.
Microwave, dishwasher — she would rather you treat it as an everyday tool and not worry. Only be gentle enough that pieces don't knock into each other and chip. Even advice that small says something about how much she loves these vessels.
Not a million-yen art object — she would rather be your everyday first choice
"It isn't that I want to make million-yen art pieces." She learned under a well-known potter and has genuine technique behind her, yet what she keeps her eyes on is always somebody's ordinary dinner table.
Drink miso soup from a soup cup if you like. Eat cereal from a rice bowl. And if it breaks, come and buy another one.
To be used without ceremony, as one of the everyday first-choice pieces you actually reach for: that modest, warm wish is folded into the soft white she makes. Made by someone who accepts her own clumsiness and enjoys growing a step at a time, her vessels seem to offer a quiet approval of ordinary life each time you pick one up.
From muny: a note for you
"Sometimes I look at what I made last year and can't bear it — I wonder how I ever thought it was any good." Turned around, her words are proof that she is still growing, fast, at this very moment. Rather than chasing what is in front of her, she is spending a lifetime sharpening both her craft and herself. That single-mindedness, we think, is what gives these vessels their depth. There is a warmth in this kohiki that reaches you the instant your fingers touch it — and we hope it finds a place at your table, too.
