Kazuya ishida 石田和也 CV

Kazuya Ishida was born into a family of potters in Bizen. Bizen has one of the six ‘ancient kilns’ and is famous for its traditional unglazed high-temperature-fired bizen-style pottery. He uses wood-fired noborigama (multiple chambers climbing kiln) and anagama (single-chamber climbing kiln). He trained with Jun Isezaki (a Living National Treasure in Bizen) for four years, followed by time spent in the UK learning different styles of pottery, before he established his own studio in Bizen. Invited into the Anagama Project run by the University of Oxford, he has been a lead resident potter teaching kiln making, firing and pottery making, while lecturing about his craft. He makes sculptures and vases featuring his distinctive spiraling marks, created with a technique inspired by a teenage love for breakdancing. In using limited materials (specifically, natural clay and natural ash glazes) in line with the Bizen tradition, he explores the rhythms and patterns of Nature. The contemporary forms of his work reflect the primordial, rippled textures and patterns of the ocean bed, the tectonic shifts of a cliff face, and the marks that ebbing tides have left on rock pools, pebbles, and seashells.