Twelve solid years of craft technique, built up at kilns in Kyoto and Shiga. On that foundation, the potter Sei Ishido makes vessels entirely his own — pieces that hold both a clarity that stops you for a moment and a warmth that settles easily into daily life.
We visited his studio to ask about his restless curiosity as a maker, and about the water that runs through his work.
An instinct, and the climb toward the wheel
Ishido says that from childhood he had a vague sense that he wanted work that gave things form. The person who set him properly on that road was his high school art teacher. A single remark — go to art school — made him see his own possibilities, and he went on to a university in Kyoto, a city with deep ceramic roots. It was an advertisement for the university, seen there, that settled his course.
"There was a shot of someone throwing on the wheel, looking like they were having a wonderful time, and I instinctively thought: that looks fun. I've always had this urge to take one thing as far as it will go, and it fit perfectly."
Wheel work has a depth you can never quite exhaust. After graduating, he went back to the fundamentals at a ceramics training school in Kyoto that trains professional craftspeople. The rivals he sharpened himself against there made his attachment to technique stronger still.
Twelve years as a craftsman, and waking up as an artist
After the training school, Ishido joined a Zeze-ware kiln in Shiga Prefecture and spent twelve years building a career as a craftsman. He was on the front line from the start: with no predecessor in the role, he learned the ropes from a veteran brought in to help, and came to handle the whole sequence alone, from the wheel through to firing the kiln.
As a student there had been the pleasure of making whatever he liked at whatever size he liked. The craftsman's world is nothing of the sort. Dimensions cannot drift; the question is how accurately, how beautifully, and with what yield you can fire the kiln's traditional forms. That hard professional shift in mindset is the foundation of the technique he has now.
Later, as the kiln passed to a new generation, Ishido decided to go independent as an artist.
"At first I worried about whether I could make a living. But once I started, customers would tell me a vessel I'd made because I thought it was good was beautiful, or remarkable — and they were pleased. That pleasure fed straight into wanting to make the next one, and before I knew it I was completely absorbed in this work."
The water of Lake Biwa, expressed through clay and glaze
The one unmoving theme beneath Ishido's work is water. The source of it is fishing on Lake Biwa, an experience he has known since he was small.
"If you stay by the water from morning until evening, the sky reflects on the surface of the lake and changes beautifully, moment by moment, with the angle of the sun and then the sunset. Wondering how on earth I could bring that feeling into my work is what led to the style I make now."
That intention reaches the people who use his pieces without a word being exchanged. Ishido says nothing pleases him more than the moments when customers tell him a vessel looks fresh with water, or like the face of cracked ice.
He works in three signature styles — and in fact the glaze is the same for all of them. He draws out the different expressions by changing the clay. Because his glaze is delicate and runs very easily, he measures its consistency strictly every time he applies it, counting the seconds in his head to hold the quality even. He also applies techniques for tea utensils learned in his craftsman years: leaving the finger ridges that show the momentum of the wheel, or calculating the clay's own urge to move in order to produce a beautiful distortion. A fleeting natural beauty, made concrete on the surface of a vessel.
The habits of a hand become the character you live with
Industrial products today are made to an astonishing accuracy, finer than a millimetre. Ishido insists on making by hand because he wants people to enjoy something a manufactured product cannot offer: a story behind the object.
"Even working from the same model, a different maker's habits and rhythm naturally come through as character. That's where the interest of handmade work lies. If you use a piece while imagining the background — what the maker was feeling as they finished it — I think you'll enjoy it that much more in your daily life."
Ishido's vessels arrive already sealed to reduce how much water they absorb. As you use them, the fine web of lines known as kannyu, or crazing, develops its own character, and you can enjoy the same kind of pleasant ageing you get with leather. There is a particular fondness that only handmade vessels earn: they grow into something that belongs to you alone.
So that centuries from now, it still belongs in someone's day
Once fired, ceramic is said to remain almost permanently and not to break down naturally.
"I want to avoid a future where what we made is just sitting there as rubbish. Which is exactly why we have a responsibility to sharpen our technique and raise our accuracy — to reduce the industrial waste that failed pieces amount to."
With that stoic craftsman's temperament, Ishido offers advice to younger makers too: experience being a craftsman first and widen the range of technique you can draw on, and the scope of what you find interesting as an artist will be broader for it.
Something made with his own enjoyment travels out and comes back as someone else's daily pleasure. Keeping that circulation in mind, he sits down at the wheel again today.
"Hundreds of years after I'm dead, even if nobody knows who made it any more, I'd like to be making things that are still in somebody's hands, still being used because they think it's good."
From muny: a note for you
Holding one of Sei Ishido's vessels feels a little like tracing the still surface of water with a fingertip — quietly absorbing. A stoic craftsman's exactitude, and a freshness spun out of beautiful memories of Lake Biwa. We hope you'll welcome work that brings both stillness and colour to your table, and enjoy the time spent raising it beautifully alongside the food you cook.
