Shimizu's vessels add a quiet touch of colour to the most ordinary table. Simple, yet with beautiful colours that catch the eye at once, and a feel in the hand that is startlingly easy to live with — how do they come about?
The road Shimizu has taken to get here was not a smooth one. She kept searching for what it was that she could do, and behind the vessel-making she arrived at lies a thoroughgoing kindness and care that comes from someone who pays attention to her own daily life.
After the struggle, choosing her own way of working with clay
The story begins as she was preparing for university entrance exams. Drawn to making things with her hands rather than to drawing, Shimizu enrolled in the crafts department of an art university. She spent a year covering the three foundations — dyeing, lacquer and ceramics — evenly, and chose ceramics as the one she most enjoyed doing.
"At university I made nothing but sculptural objects," she recalls. But around graduation, thinking that objects would be a difficult thing to sustain a practice on, she shifted quietly toward vessels.
What followed was one detour after another. Conventional job-hunting was never going to suit her, so she rented a studio in Kyoto and kept working while she figured things out. Then the pandemic made even that increasingly impossible. She returned to her hometown for a while, took a job with nothing to do with ceramics, and spent two years without touching clay.
"As things started to settle down, I asked myself what I actually wanted to do — and I decided to go back to ceramics."
She moved back to Kyoto, learned technique under a potter, and juggled part-time jobs to rebuild her life through sheer effort. There is a strong will in the fact that, on a road as uneven as that, she chose to walk it under her own power. That perspective — of one person paying attention to her own daily life — may be exactly where the gentle, dependable appeal of her vessels comes from.
Enough to make supermarket deli food feel like a treat: a thoroughly practical eye
At the base of everything Shimizu makes are two ideas: that nothing about using it should feel wrong, and that it should dissolve into ordinary life. "You don't have to handle it carefully. On a day when you're worn out from work and you've picked up something ready-made from the supermarket, if putting it on one of my plates makes you feel just slightly happier, that's enough," she says, smiling. And true to that, her vessels are remarkably practical.
She selects semi-porcelain clay specifically: comfortable in the microwave or dishwasher, and resistant to staining. Beyond that, she pursues shapes that aren't eccentric — ones that stack neatly with your other dishes when you put them away in the cupboard. As her ideal of that, she names, with real respect, a plain white plate familiar to households across Japan: the one given away in a long-running spring bread campaign here.
"It's simple, but functionally it's the best. That plate is incredibly easy to use."
She actually measured the one at her parents' house, and translated that most table-friendly size into her own shallow bowls. Her eye for the beauty of usefulness stays fixed on the middle of everyday life.
Function as beauty, dissolved into daily life
Stress-free semi-porcelain:
A clay chosen for the strengths of both earthenware and porcelain — happy in the microwave or dishwasher, and slow to stain.
Stacking that fits your home:
Shapes that aren't eccentric, arrived at by subtraction, so they sit neatly with everything else in the cupboard.
A mug handle worked out to the millimetre:
Set slightly low, at just the right height so the weight doesn't register — with careful sanding so it never catches a finger.
The invisible extra step that removes any sense of wrongness
Pick up one of Shimizu's vessels and, within a simple form, a striking beauty of colour comes at you. Two or more glazes, applied to different areas of a single piece. It is an accumulation of labour that hardly bears thinking about.
"Whether you do it or not completely changes the atmosphere, the liveliness, when the pieces are lined up. If a small extra step changes how they look and the chances of somebody picking one up, I don't want to spare the effort."
That insistence on the extra step is concentrated in her mugs, which have become something of a signature. They hold plenty, they sit steadily without tipping, and above all they are easy to hold. Rather than simply attaching the handle, she gives it a small foot to widen the bonding surface and prevent it coming away. The inner corners where your fingers rest are then sanded smooth.
"I set the handle a little low, too. You can lift it as if cupping it from underneath, which makes the weight less noticeable. But too low and your fingers won't fit, so I leave exactly the right amount of space."
Through repeated revisions from the earliest model, the mug has evolved into a light wall thickness that your fingers slip straight into. On the base sits a quiet signature: the character "と" (to), from Tomoka.
From muny: a note for you
There is something curious about Shimizu's vessels: put even a supermarket side dish on one and the table brightens. Behind it are the struggles she has worked through as one person living an ordinary life, and a gentle craftsman's determination to eliminate anything that feels even slightly wrong. Usable every day without effort, but a little cheering every time you use it. We hope you'll welcome vessels this warm into your own life.
