A Collaborative Collection with Nishihara Akira
I have always worked alone.
Not out of preference, exactly. I came through formal schooling, workshops, residencies — spaces where craft is taught and technique is shared. I learned a great deal in those places. But a mentor in the deepest sense — someone whose way of seeing sits alongside yours over time, who challenges you not occasionally but continuously, whose philosophy slowly becomes part of how you think — that was something I had never found. I had knowledge. I had practice. I had years of solitary hours in the studio, building a relationship with the kiln that no one else was part of.
What I did not have was a sensei.
I did not know I was looking for one until I encountered Nishihara Akira.
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The introduction came through Masaki — a name offered, a body of work shared. I looked at Akira's pieces and felt something I had not expected: not admiration exactly, but recognition. These forms were doing something I understood at a level beneath articulation. They were quiet in the way that only deeply considered things can be quiet. Simple not because nothing had been thought, but because everything unnecessary had been removed. Surfaces that did not perform. Shapes that breathed.
As a maker whose practice is built on saggar firing — on loading a kiln with wood chips, copper wire, metal mesh, dried grasses and flowers, pine cones, metal oxides — iron, cobalt, manganese — and then sealing it and surrendering the outcome to the fire — I had spent years searching for forms that could receive that process honestly. Forms that did not compete with what the fire would bring. Forms open enough, still enough, to let the smoke and the minerals and the heat arrive and leave their mark without disturbance.
Akira's forms were exactly that. They were waiting for exactly this.
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When we finally spoke, I was not prepared for how quickly the conversation deepened. He did not speak about ceramics the way most people do. He spoke about geology, about chemistry, about the philosophy of imperfection, about a concept he lived rather than merely referenced: 守破離 — Shu Ha Ri.
To preserve. To break. To depart.
He described it as the architecture of a lifetime's practice — the years of absorbing a tradition so completely that it lives in the body, the moment when that tradition reveals itself as a set of choices rather than laws, and finally the step beyond both — toward something that belongs entirely to the maker, forged from the tradition but no longer contained by it.
As he spoke, I realised I had been living inside this framework without having a name for it. The years of formal learning — Shu. The gradual discovery that surrendering control inside the saggar was not the abandonment of craft but its deepest expression — Ha. The slow movement toward a practice that is fully my own, still unfinished, still becoming — Ri.
He had a language for what I had been doing alone, in the dark of my studio, for years.
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He also gave me an image that has not left me since.
His studio name — 十六夜庵, the Hermitage of the 16th Night — carries his entire aesthetic in a single picture. The full moon of the 15th is perfect, complete, radiant. It is also, in its perfection, a kind of ending — beauty that has nowhere left to go. The moon of the 16th has already begun its departure from that perfection. Still luminous. Still fully present. But touched by the first suggestion of imperfection, the first movement away from the absolute. It is alive in a way the full moon is not, precisely because it is no longer complete.
I had been trying to articulate this about my own work for years. The saggar-fired piece that moves me most is never the one where everything went according to plan. It is the one where the fire arrived somewhere unexpected and honest — where the copper left a mark I did not place, where the pine cone burned away and left its ghost on the surface, where the surrender was total and the result was something I could not have made alone.
Beauty from the imperfect. The real ease of letting go.
Akira had been living inside this understanding for decades. For me, meeting him was the beginning of truly inhabiting it.
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It was only on the last day, as I was saying goodbye, that he asked me to call him Akira.
Not during the conversations, not in the midst of ideas being exchanged — but at the moment of departure, when everything that had passed between us had already settled into something understood. It was offered quietly, the way significant things often are. And with it came something else — a mention of what might come next. Of learning together. Of a future that was not yet planned but already felt inevitable.
In Japanese tradition, a sensei does not announce himself. He is recognised — slowly, through encounter, through the quality of what passes between two people over time. Standing there at the threshold of goodbye, I understood that something had already begun. Not a formal apprenticeship. Not a structured exchange. Something rarer — a relationship between two makers who had found, across different traditions and considerable distance, that they were asking the same questions. And who had decided, quietly, to keep asking them together.
He is the sensei I did not know I was looking for. And this collection is the first thing made in the light of that.
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The Shuhari Collection is what emerged from that encounter.
Each piece begins in Akira's studio in Arita — thrown on the wheel, finished by hand, shaped by a lifetime's navigation of tradition and departure. The forms travel to France. They enter my saggar kiln, loaded with wood chips and copper wire, metal mesh and dried flowers, pine cones and metal oxides — iron, cobalt, manganese — each element chosen for what it will release under heat. The kiln is sealed. The fire takes over.
What comes out carries both of us. His restraint makes room for my fire. My fire reveals what was always latent in his form. The simplicity he builds into every piece — the surfaces that do not insist, the shapes that breathe — becomes, inside the saggar, a genuine openness. The smoke finds its way. The minerals move. The heat pools where it chooses.
Each piece is unrepeatable. Each one is the record of a specific moment of transformation — his philosophy meeting my process, his decades meeting my years, his mastery of departure meeting my learning to surrender.
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守 Shu. I am still absorbing what he has shown me.
破 Ha. I feel the edges of something beginning to shift.
離 Ri. I do not know yet where I am going. But I am going there differently than I would have without him.
This collection is the beginning of that journey. Not an arrival — a departure. Named, as it should be, for the path itself.
Shu Ha Ri.
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